Upload to external Firewire hard drive?

[c87]

Hi,

I'm on the edge of buying the HV20 at the moment, i just have one concern, and that is regarding transferring the footage from the camera to my laptop.

I'm running a dual core 1.66 Acer laptop with 1GB RAM, 120GB hard drive, i have usb2 connectivity, but no firewire ports.

What i was thinking of doing was to buy an external Seagate 500GB hard drive that has both Firewire and USB 2 connections, transfer the footage to the external hard drive via Firewire, and have the editing software installed also on the external drive.

Would this be a practical solution, but if not practical possible?

I tried going the cardbus route with a pcmcia to firewire card, but i had no luck as i had problems with not being able to boot XP with the card installed in the laptop, and i had driver issues too.

Thanks for reading, i hope there can be a solution.

[tcindie]

Since there's no firmware on the drive to control such a job, it is not possible to go directly from camera to drive.

As for your cardbus issue, it should be fixable. I had issues booting while my external firewire drive was connected via cardbus too, but if I boot without it connected, then install the pcmcia card, and plug in the drive it works just fine.