Laptop Drive Speed
 

I am planning on buying a laptop, and I want to make sure that it is going to kick to capture the HDV stuff - maybe the HVX or others.

How important is hard disc speed - 4200 rpm vs. 5400 rpm vs 10000 rpm?

4200rpm will be good enough for capture but will cause problems if you layer video and try to play back in real time.

5400 will probably be OK

7200 is the optimum, I don't think hard drives go any faster in Laptops at this time.

I disagree with 4200 being good enough for capture. I get dropouts on my laptop with a 4200 drive and it all appears to be data rate. I would consider 5400 as a minimum unless your editor includes a barebones logger.

i have successfully captured dv to a winxp laptop with a 4200 rpm drive, using scenealyzer with no background processes running... i wouldn't want to try it with a generic xp install.

take a look at the $$ they are charging to upgrade to 7200 rpm... what i did was get the 4200 rpm drive and do full installs of all the software i'd be using, then clone the entire drive, and copy the clone onto a new 5400 rpm drive... that way i had a backup to use, or to clone a replacement drive off of.

laptop drives will never match the performance of 3.5" hard drives... so maybe the smartest thing to do is to get a cheap 300 gig drive with a 16 mb cache, put it into a usb 2.0 enclosure, and just use that to store all your footage on... don't thrash the laptop drive that has the o.s. on it.

Thanks guys. With straight DV I woudn't worry so much, but I am guessing that the HVX is going to be pumping out a much higher data rate. I don't have numbers though.

well, with the HVX, it's not the same issue as either your capturing to tape at DV25 or yourt capturing to P2 and it's a file transfer from the P2 card rather than realtime capture, so disc speed is not such an issue. There might be playback problems with a 4200rpm drive if you want real time effects from your editing program though.

Dylan,

It was my understanding from the below thread that you could capture directly to the hard drive.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=55017

I'm sure the P2 capture would be fine regardless of speed.

Well I'm not capturing HD but I do capture to a 300GB SATA Seagate drive in a USB/FW400/SATA enclosure and the whole setup cost less than $200. I'm sure it has the speed to capture from an HVX. Bonus is I can plug it into my desktop PC and I'm instantly ready to edit.