Hi everybody!

I have a 12" PB which I'm using for video editing right now... the only problem is that I need a separate drive for capture and scratch, so I just got a Seagate Momentus 80GB 5400 drive and an external Macally FW/USB2 enclosure. The PB is outfitted with an OEM 60GB 4200 Hitachi Travelstar. I know that this isn't the best of setups, but I really need the portability, so meh.
My question is, should I use the new Seagate, which is faster, in the enclosure as the scratch disk, or should I install it into the PB and use the 4200 RPM Hitachi that I'd take out as the external scratch? The Hitachi would be slower as a scratch disk, and the Seagate would be nice to have internally, but my main concern right now is video render speed.

Thanks!

Those drives both sound a little slow for DV, I have only used 7200 RPM firewire drives myself. When I tried at 5400 RPM drive it dropped frames constantly and wasn't usable.

Your mileage may vary however...

Yah I know...

Prob is, I really need something to tote around with me easily, and that means 2.5" drives. I can only afford the 5400 RPM one right now.

Good news is that I've never had dropped frames, just slow rendering and HD thrashing. Does that mean that I should keep the 5400 as external scratch?

Just leave it as it is and use the 5400rpm as your external capture drive. You shouldn't have any problems as long as everything else is nice and clean. I have captured and edited to an internal 4200rpm drive without any dropped frames so you should certainly be able to do it on an external drive and it should improve your render times, but only slightly. You would see the biggest increase with a Firewire 800 drive that is a RAID 0 (internally, see LaCie Big Disk Extreme (http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10551)) but the 12" doesn't have FW800 so FW400 would be a close second and still has plenty of bandwidth for DV editing.

If you are having any thru-put problems it might be that you are sharing the Firewire bus with the camera AND the drive. Some setups don't like this because it's sending and receiving the data over the same bus and can get clogged up. The solution is to get one of those Firewire PC add-on cards and use it for one of the Firewire devices.