Hello.

 I've recently purchased an external hard drive to assist me with video editing. LACIE HD 500GB. But I'm having trouble making it work with Pinnacle Liquid 6 Pro. The HD has an array of firewire and USB ports for easy connectivity. I've re-installed Pinnacle on my pc and created folders on the external HD ready for capturing from my camcorders. When I go to capture video, Pinnacle recognises the external HD. So far, so good. But when I plug my camcorder into the firewire ports at the back of the external HD, Pinnacle doesn't recognise the camera device. I find it really odd.

My external hard drive is connected via USB to my USB port on my computer, and my Camcorder is connected Via Firewire to the Firewire port at the back of the external hard drive. What is the problem? Is it the USB connection from the External HD to the PC? Should I really connect the External HD via a firewire link to my PC instead of a USB connection? Or do I need to install the entire program on my external HD?

 Please help!

Wow - Those IEEE ports on your hard-drive are for connected your harddrive to your computer. You have two so that you can daisy-chain more than one harddrive. So, you would connect your harddrive to your computer with the IEEE connection and then connect your camera to the other IEEE port on your harddrive.

For what it's worth, I wouldn't recommend this configuration - I would go with a separate firewire connection to your camera or deck. Funny enough, I've done exactly what I described above with Liquid 6 on my daughter's computer when she was doing a school project and didn't have any troubles. A lot depends on you firewire chipset.

Good luck,

This really isn't a usable setup. Think about it; you're trying to capture via firewire, but it's running over a single shared USB line. So the data stream runs from the camera over the firewire to the hard drive, that then has to package it up for transmission over the USB line to the computer, to Liquid, with the data stream then running back over the same USB line to the hard drive, which is still trying to deliver the camera data down to the computer.

Needless to say, this will overload a USB line real quick. For that matter, it will overload a firewire line, so connecting the hard drive via firewire and daisychaining the camera through the drive still won't work. You need to use two separate firewire ports on the computer, one for the camera and one for the hard drive. You can also run your hard drive over USB with the camera on the firewire, and that should work as well.

If the external harddrive is connected to the computer by firewire, you might get away with daisy-chaining the camera to the drive (data rates are pretty low compared to the capacity of firewire) but it is at best a suboptimal configuration and most likely will lead to dropped frames and other troubles.

I run 5 USB devices and four are external drives.

The drives are NTSF formated to accommodate 60 minute captures in one chunk. 

I ran out USB ports and tried a USB hub to add more...no such ruck, you can't run two video drives on one USB hub without a slowdown.

I added another USB card so I'm now loaded with extra USB Ports. I've distributed the drives across 4 different USB connection cards so they don;t bump into each other on the wire or the board.

The software runs  on C;  I render to another internal drive called "Z" and the four external drives is where I keep raw files. The ProBOB will give me trouble from time to time because it shares a USB card with another  drive , but it's seldom used so no big deal.

You can add USB cards until you run out of slots.  

You are right about drives, the motherboard, the chipsets, the recource assignment of your system for this to work. Test one addition at a time. I'm using Acomdata Hybrid Drives - so far quite painless.

 
It was the right solution for me because I currently use about 4 Terabytes of drive space for storage and its growing fast. That, and my machine only has 2 internal drive bays. The same clients keep coming back so I have to keep all their tapes digitized ready to go. It was cheaper than buying networked file servers, which is the next step after I get the new machine up and running with Media Composer. I charge the clients for each new drive required so it requires no cash. Its as much a business strategy as it is technical. The acom data has push button backup--so in spite of the massive storage requirement I'm not at risk. If a drive goes down...no loss.