I had that prob too, with a camcorder I have.
This is what I did, I went to Newegg.com and found a hard drive enclosure that had both a firewire connection on it and a usb connection. I then also bought hard drive to put in the enclosure.
I plugged the drive into the computer and then the camcorder into the external hard drive. I then downloaded from the the camcorder directly onto external hard drive.