Oops. I got cought up in a classic example of mixing up bits and bytes . DV-25 is actually 25 megabits/sec ( I knew it ), and Firewire speed is 50 megabytes/sec, so all my calculations were worthless. In theory transferring DV video from hard drive through Firewire should happen at 16x real time.

Well, for some reason it takes 15 min to transfer a 13 GB file (1 hour DV avi) from one internal hard drive to another on my PC, so the hard drive itself seems to be the bottleneck here. Although my PC is not an example of leading edge technology, I do not suppose average HDD camcorders would be equipped with faster drives than my 2 years old 7200 rpm SATA drive.