Advice on laptop upgrade for running Vegas

L

LUCAS_HITCHBERG

Active member
Greetings,

I hope I'm posting to the right place on this...

Got a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop and want to add an external harddrive for Vegas 5 editing. Maybe an internal drive solution as well?

Specs are 1GHz cpu, 384ram (512 max), 30GB system drive, 2 PCMCIA slots, a pair of USB 1 ports, 2 swappable bays (ie floppy/battery) and only a single firewire port. Since dropped frames/stuttering can be an issue when sharing one firewire line for both harddrive and cam/deck, I'm looking for a solution. (System drive just doesn't offer much space for capture/moving files.)

Looking at a 120-250 GB external drive and a stable, economical (non-proprietary accessory priced), configuration with good throughput. Any drives reccommended or ones to avoid? What's a good set-up here? Please be detailed with your answers . Thanks in advance.

LHB
 
1GHz? That's pretty tight.

It will work, but you're going to be hurting. Very little will be realtime, and forget any kind of rendering speed.

I have no complaints with my Maxtor One Touch 250GB drive. Available with both firewire and USB (and both).
 
Jubal28 said:
1GHz? That's pretty tight.

It will work, but you're going to be hurting. Very little will be realtime, and forget any kind of rendering speed.

I have no complaints with my Maxtor One Touch 250GB drive. Available with both firewire and USB (and both).
Click to expand...

Agree on both points. The cool thing about Vegas is that you can at least run the software on MUCH lower system requirements than nearly any other professional program out there, BUT you're still going to feel some tension when trying to edit on that laptop.

I've always loved Maxtor as well, but I was at Costco a few months back and picked up a 250GB external Western Digital (also one touch backup) that's worked great as well, and was priced about $200. It's got several USB ports, as well as firewire.
 
Even though Vegas 5 has a minimum of a 400Mhz cpu, I figured it wouldn't be really fast or really efficient; however, I have a workstation as my main NLE. I'd like to use the laptop as a secondary system for smaller work projects and personal stuff.

Looking at the new B&H catalog today, I just found that there is a PCMCIA 3 port firewire adapeter that should (?) solve my question. Can you tell me if a PCMCIA adapter's thru-put is fast, as in fast enough to read/write DV? And can they handle 2 simultaneous streams at 400Mbps? Burning from the 300GB drive to the DVD, for example.

If so, I plan on an external Seagate 300GB and a Lacie DVD+-Burner with Lightscribe. I can use these with some other PCs in my editing studio. Whataya think?

LHB
 
Multiple ports on one card can run into bottlenecks. I added a firewire/USB2 card to my system, and ended up using the USB2 port just so firewire contention would be minimum. Even at that, I swap my camera and DVD burner on the system firewire port to keep other ports clear during intense workouts. If I try to do Firewire/USB2 on that card at same time, I get burn errors.
 
galt said:
Multiple ports on one card can run into bottlenecks. I added a firewire/USB2 card to my system, and ended up using the USB2 port just so firewire contention would be minimum. Even at that, I swap my camera and DVD burner on the system firewire port to keep other ports clear during intense workouts. If I try to do Firewire/USB2 on that card at same time, I get burn errors.
Click to expand...

Just so I'm clear on your report, if I use the built-in firewire for say the camera and ONE of the firewire ports on the PCMCIA card for the harddrive at the same time, it should work OK? But if I use TWO of the firewire ports on the PCM card at the same time there could be trouble. Right?

Thanks
 
Yep. Or if I use FIrewire and USB2 on the PCMCIA card at same time, that could also be trouble, depending... YMMV.
 
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