Hi all,
I am wondering how the laptops out there right now , which many seem to have 4200 RPM drives, perform when doing firewire editing on these drive ?? Dropped frames ??

Also are the external drives I see now, many are both USB2.0 and firewire, how well do they perform?? are they fast enough to be one of you edit drives?? or are they more to use as backup storage for your video ??

Thanks,
Mike M.

I have a Sony Vaio which, from time to time, I've used for firewire capture. Never had a dropped frame.

You should be able to capture direct to an external firewire hard drive without problems, as Firewire is plenty fast enough to keep up. If you experience problems doing this, it's not the fact that it's firewire but rather there may be a problem in the drive itself or the interface card.

I don't personally use USB 2.0 for anything so I can't speak with authority on that.

As far as laptops, I have used many 5400RPM drives in laptops, and they have no problems capturing. After all, it's not technically 'capturing' that you do with firewire - it's technically just a data transfer. You shouldn't have a problem with any speed drive. Overall system performance, however, will suffer the slower your drive gets. Realistically though, 5400 and up should never give you a problem. As for 4200, I have no idea as I don't have any drives at that speed.

I have a DELL Latitude C800 with a 900 mhz processor in it
(2 years old). So it ain't the fastest baby on the planet. I do
believe it has a 5400 rpm drive, although I'm not sure. As long
as I have defragged my harddisk and quit other applications
I'm not dropping frames. I also have an external 160 gb maxtor
firewire drive which doesn't drop either.

As a sidenote: I am a professional programmer so I have lots
and lots of stuff installed and running, like webservers, database
server software etc. That's what I stop etc. before I start
capturing. This type of work also fragments my harddisks quite
a lot.

I use an older Dell, P3-600 mhz with 512 ram, 40 gig hdd, for "capture" I use a Maxtor 120 gig 7200 rpm drive. This unit is my 2nd edit system so I can do 2 projects at once and frankly other than being slower than my desktop system, it works fine.

I did a gig in Hawaii over the summer and brought the laptop and drive as my edit station and it worked flawlessly for the 10 days I was there.

No dropped frames at all.

Don