Some more links to external hard drive enclosures:
Mainly Firewire and some combo (Firewire+USB 2.0):
http://www.firewiredirect.com/firewi...drivekit.shtml
USB 2.0 enclosures:
http://www.usbgear.com/usa/USB_enclosure.html
Here's an article from Tom's Hardware comparing 3 external hard drives and also comparing USB 2.0 vs. Firewire. Very helpful article, though I wish they had tested the exact same hard drive using the two different interfaces, so we can directly compare the speeds of the USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/mobile/...827/index.html
Especially enlightening remark that I want to point out. Though they found that the USB 2.0 HD seemed to have a higher maximum theoretical transfer rate than the Firewire drives (30Mb/s vs. 18 Mb/s), the Firewire interface maintains a consistent transfer rate from the beginning to the end of the test. As the writer put it:
"...don't be blinded by the higher performance levels of USB 2.0: even if up to 30 MB/s is possible, the USB protocol allows for interruptions to the data stream at all times. This is a killer for high quality video streams." The conclusion was that, "if real-time data transfer is important for you, then FireWire is the clear choice."
So for DV capture and editing, it seems that Firewire is the way to go. A consistent 18Mb/s transfer rate is plenty, since real-time DV capture requires a transfer rate of only about 3.6Mb/s.
~Kendalf
