Your opinion please: Laptop Hard Drive 5400rpm or 7200rpm
 

Hey guys...

I wanted to get your professional opinions on my situation.

I use my laptop from time to time to do some quick editing while on the road.

I have an opportunity to get a 120gig / 5400rpm drive for very cheap. (I need to increase my overall space)

My question:

Can a Pentium 1.8m with 1 gig of RAM---capture DV without choking or dropping frames to a 5400rpm (8 meg cache) drive..?


Thank you for your time!

Is this an internal or external drive? Sometimes external drives will have problems, even if you have a 7200rpm drive in there.

Brent,

My Sony Vaio laptop has a 4200 rpm hard drive (3 years old, 2.4 GHz P4 processor with 512 megs RAM) and it captures DV with no hiccups whatsoever (Adobe Premiere 1.5, but I had the 2.0 trial version as well). I have also tested several external (USB) hard drives, from 4200 to 7200 and found no difference in performance as far as capturing. The key is how your system performs overall, you may have a 15000 rpm hard drive... but if you're computer is running 150 applications in the background, it will fail you no question.

A fine tuned laptop with ANY hard drive will do the job for you!

I have to say it depends. I have a HP with a AMD 3200+ Athlon, 512MB, and a 4200rpm 60GB. In the full feature capture ('logging') tool in Liquid, it will drop frames. But the quick tool that does straight capture without the controls, no dropped frames.

And I agree, George... it depends. I might be lucky because Vaio laptops (and desktops as well) are specially designed for multimedia, so mine it's already 'fine tuned' for the job.