This topic seems to be recurring in many posts regarding specific camcorders so I thought it is worth to start a separate thread to discuss the pros and cons of both solutions at a general level.
My take on this is that digital tape camcorders are superior in most aspects to hard drive solutions and are simply a better choice.
Many posters state that a major advantage of hard drive camcorder is fast drag and drop transfer of video files from the camcorder to a computer, just like transfer of image files from a still camera. While the "drag and drop" functionality exists, the "fast" aspect does not. Assuming that a hard drive camcorder would produce same video quality as a tape based one, it would have to record at the same bitrate, which is over 25 megabytes per second (miniDV / HDV2). But then the only technology available now to transfer video from a camcorder to a computer is a Firewire or USB2 bus. Both Firewire and USB2 have top transfer rates of about 50 MBps (USB2 being just a little faster) . This is quite a bottleneck. Forget about instant file transfers - it would not even be 2 times faster than real time capture from a tape camcorder, assuming that the bus works at its theoretical maximum speed, which is not even possible (and USB2 would perform even worse than Firewire - check out this: http://www.cwol.com/firewire/firewire-vs-usb.htm)
A big advantage of tape is reliability. Tape mechanisms have proven to be more reliable and not as prone to failures due to vibrations or shock, as hard drives. And if a tape mechanism breaks while recording, you still have the possibility of retrieving the tape and accessing its content. When a hard drive fails on a camcorder, you can forget about the recorded content (AFAIK there are no companies offering such services as data retrieval from a broken HDD camcorder).
Then there is convenience. While being on a vacation would you want to carry around a laptop to dump the files when the camcorder's drive fills up?
Yet another thing to consider is the issue of backing up the files. When you record on tape, you automatically get a reliable backup of the video on the tape itself, while with hard drive you have to go through hurdles of creating the backup yourself.
As far as the advantages of hard drive, the only one I see is the instant playback of a selected clip. But then at some moment you need to get the video off the camcorder anyway, so is that really important? Many miniDV camcorders have a search by date feature, which scans the tape and starts playing a clip recorded on a given date. This also provides easy access to selected clips.
Finally, one might argue that in reality the transfer times from existing HDD cams are faster than what I calculated based on 25 MBps bitrate, because the HDD cams record MPEG2 only at 9 MBps. Well, that can be counted only towards their disadvantage, because lower bitrate translates to lower quality, and in fact the video quality of the current HDD cams is by far inferior to miniDV quality.

The IEEE1394-1995-a specification provides for 400 Mbit/s (50MB/s) transfer speeds with the updated IEEE1394b "Firewire 800" doubling that.

USB 1.1 allows a maximum transfer rate of 12Mbits/s. USB 2.0 has a raw data rate at 480Mbit/s but the effective rate is only 40MBps or up to 320Mbps for bulk transfer to/from a USB 2.0 hard drive with nothing else sharing the data bus.

http://www.everythingusb.com/usb2/faq.htm

It's a little tricky looking at "mbit/s" vs. "MB/s". I looked around to see what the data rate should be for realtime DV transfer (about 30-35MB/s?) but I couldn't find a quote.
One poster with a HDD camcorder pointed out that his recording media is fully sealed and never exposed to dust, sand, or moisture. He argued that made a HDD more reliable from that aspect. I you lived in the desert or on a beach, that might be a major benefit.

Anyway, if I'm going to deal with the MPEG2 format, then it better be HDV2 so that I'm getting 25MB/s throughput and high-resolution in return. Various editors here on CCI have talked about hard drives being the future for camcorders but I don't myself see why that would be the case. Personally, I vastly prefer tape for the reasons you gave.

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.

I've just gone back to spelling it out... The DV video rate is typically said to be a "nominal" 25 megabit per second data stream however that does not include the audio (which I believe can be three different rates), timecode, track information and error correction, so the total data stream rate would come out greater. I have measured and calculated it at 29.07 at megabits per second, but I may have made an error in my methods and calculations over two years ago.

That appears to be close to what I'm getting on my non-SATA 7200 rpm to 5400 rpm drive. (I ain't gonna time it exactly....)



Rich

__________________
FireWire Survey