I lost almost 30 GB of family photos almost a year ago, (May 2005) and NEVER want that to happen again. I feel your pain. What is worse: I printed a contact sheet of all 6,000+ so I have little one inch previews of everything I lost. Talk about salt in the wound!
I ran out the next week and bought a RAID5 system and I swear it is the easiest backup solution ever. I also have a Maxtor external drive with one of those backup buttons. I actually crack a smile when I push it. 250GB is a little cramped for me, so I changed the backup scripts to use my 700GB RAID and saved the 250GB for HDTV recordings.
My RAID system uses SATS drives so it looks and behaves just like a normal internal hard drive. The drives never sleep and there is a slight performance hit because a dedicated processor calculates a parity for all the writes to the array. Overall, it is still faster than firewire, but honestly, I don't care about speed whatsoever. Cost will get you, but I went for a POSH drive bay from Granite Digital.
I solved your firewire problem by plugging the hard drive and camcorder into the two ports on my computer, not daisy-chaining them. You could try that to reduce latency. (I did this on a 400Mhz laptop)
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I ran out the next week and bought a RAID5 system and I swear it is the easiest backup solution ever. I also have a Maxtor external drive with one of those backup buttons. I actually crack a smile when I push it.
I bought a 250gb lacie drive for my back ups. Also found i couldn't use the hard drive and the camcorder at the same time on firewire
I solved your firewire problem by plugging the hard drive and camcorder into the two ports on my computer, not daisy-chaining them. You could try that to reduce latency. (I did this on a 400Mhz laptop)