does my laptop even have a PCMCIA slot?

Great!

Great!

Jason Ramsey said:
Hey. That laptop has both pcmcia and expresscard which is very good. The type I/II slot is the pcmcia slot.

Jason
Click to expand...


so Jason,

Let me get my workflow right.

I can just insert he P2 card in the PCMCIA slot on my laptop and have an external hard drive connected to the laptop via firewire and basically transfer the clips from the card to the external hard drive??

streets
 
Or straight to the internal hdd of the laptop. You will likely be limited a bit by the speed of the firewire connection if you offload to a firewire connected drive, but you can certainly do it if you are wanting to offload straight to an external drive.

You will, of course, have to have the p2 drivers installed on the laptop first.

If you have access to plug-in power, you can get an eSATA card for your expresscard slot and hook up some eSATA drives to it, which would be up to 2.5Gbps speed. I use that to edit off of on my laptop....

But, the short answer is:
Install the p2 driver as per the directions.
Then, you just stick your card in and transfer the contents and lastclip.txt folder to the location of your choice. Be it a local drive on the laptop, an external drive via firewire, usb, eSATA, or whatever.

Just think of it as moving all of the data from one HDD (your p2 card) to another HDD.

Jason
 
awesome reply!

awesome reply!

Jason Ramsey said:
Or straight to the internal hdd of the laptop. You will likely be limited a bit by the speed of the firewire connection if you offload to a firewire connected drive, but you can certainly do it if you are wanting to offload straight to an external drive.

When you say that I will be limited a bit by the speed of the fireiwire connection. What do you mean by "limited"? will there be distorted clips or dropouts etc doing it this way?

You will, of course, have to have the p2 drivers installed on the laptop first.

If you have access to plug-in power, you can get an eSATA card for your expresscard slot and hook up some eSATA drives to it, which would be up to 2.5Gbps speed. I use that to edit off of on my laptop....

I will have plug in power. we are over budget as it is but what eSATA cards and eSATA drives do you suggest? Is this a better way than just doing it to an external Hd firewire?

But, the short answer is:
Install the p2 driver as per the directions.
Then, you just stick your card in and transfer the contents and lastclip.txt folder to the location of your choice. Be it a local drive on the laptop, an external drive via firewire, usb, eSATA, or whatever.

Just think of it as moving all of the data from one HDD (your p2 card) to another HDD.

got it! You rock!
Jason
Click to expand...


thanks
 
Hey... I can't tell you for sure the offload speeds to a firewire drive, but going from memory of what I have read, they are typically a bit slower than a straight dump to an internal drive, or a eSATA connected drive. No, no distortion or anything like that. It's still just moving data. You aren't capturing video or anything.

Going into your next question and finishing off the first one:
Offload speeds via a pcmcia slot should typically be right around 2 gigs per minute. Meaning an 8 gig card would be about 4-5 minutes to offload. A 16 gig card would take about 8-9 minutes.

If you are experiencing times slower than that, then firewire, or usb bandwidth limitations would be the likely culprit. If you are talking FW800, then there may not be much of a difference in time. But, expect it to be a bit slower if using FW400 or USB2.

You could always invest in eSATA later. I use it b/c I edit primarily on a laptop and I wanted fast external storage to edit off of, rather than the smaller internal laptop drive. It's also nice to be able to take that eSATA enclosure and plug it into a desktop and start editing just the same.

Here's what I bought (don't remember all the specifics):
eSATA expresscard - around 50-70 bucks... Some cheaper. Some more expensive... you get what you pay for for the most part.

eSATA enclosure: I got a Thecus 2050 from newegg. The one I got is the "puke green" one as Kholi calls it. It is a dual enclosure (requires plugin power... no battery). It was around 130-140 bucks. The enclosure also has USB connections if needed/wanted.

I put two 320 gig SATA II drives in it. You can run it in a RAID 0 or RAID 1 with the flick of a switch. No software required, though the eSATA expresscards usually have software options as well. The drives at the time were like 80 bucks a piece or something. You can put 2 500 gig drives into it for a total of a TB in a RAid 0. Also, if you get an eSATA expresscard like mine that has two eSATA slots, you can eventually run two of the THECUS enclosures. Say each one in a RAID 0, and then the eSATA expresscard having them in a RAID 1 for example, which would give you a Terabyte RAID 1... Just an example.

Another good thing is you can swap out drives for new projects if you work on big projects, etc.

Hope that helps some.
Jason
 
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