Another happy customer here.
I had a old 120 USB 2.0/ieee1394 combo lying around. I called the number @ 8:20 AM EST and got a Rep right away, he knew exactly what to do and I was formatting the drive 5 minutes later. Transfered a 1 hour HD program and it took about 4 minutes. Just for fun I watched a show off the internal hard drive while it was transferring and it did seem to slow things down.
I then watched the show off the external drive and it looked good, but I experienced some video artifacts and audio dropouts.
I imagine this is due to the old external hard drive?????
I believe the drive inside was one of the first 120 gig HD's and I'd bet it has a 2mb or 4mb buffer at most.
I just ordered a 500 gig with a 16mb buffer, so I am hoping that will solve that problem.
The big surprise for me was being able to watch the show off the drive! I was under the impression the external drive was for archiving only, so that is just icing on the cake.
Thanks for all the insight here.