[MathewM]

I purchased the Maxtor 3000dv ext. firewire drive in conjunction with my tibook 400. The drive is rated at 7200 and is recommended for video work (Maxtor's own claims), however upon doing a heavy final cut capture, I drop frames. This is not the case with the internal drive that is only rated at 5400 and under testing is much slower than the Maxtor. Quicktime playback with large files is also 'stuttery' on the Maxtor. The drive came formated for pc's which I then reformated with Maxtor's included Mac software. I turned off virtual memory, apple talk as well as trying several other things to no avail. I checked Maxtor's site for any updated drivers, but came up empty handed.

Any help is appreciated,

Thanks.

[CRASH HARDDRIVE]

Unfortunatly, it's been documented that the TiBooks have an abysmally slow Firewire write speed. I know of several video pros who have run up against the same types of drop frame problems as you describe with TiBooks. Apple cheaped out with the FW controller chip.
http://www.barefeats.com/fire20.html.

In comparison, the 2001 iBook has nearly twice the FW write performance of the TiBook, believe it or not.

[MathewM]

Thanks, but no thanks. I already knew the ti had an 'older' firewire bus.

Anyway, imovie captures go flawlessly, with no dropframes and seamless playback, which leads me back to final cut pro. It seems it does have some compatability problems with ext. firewire drives. I'm just wondering if anyone else has used the maxtor 3000dv with success with final cut pro 2.0 and a ti...

Hi,

i am using FCP2 w/ a Ti and a 40GB Firewire drive from
Transintl (IBM drive, 7200rpm, Oxford 911). No problems whatsoever. I do not believe that the FW port of the Ti is too slow, it is slower than
that of the iBook2001, but still more than sufficient for DV.

i have read however that people have been having problems with
Maxtor drives and dropped frames, if you go to www.2-pop.com you
will find many reports on that.

hope that helps.

I