7200rpm drive on MacBookPro Laptop essential?
 

I have a Mac Book Pro laptop with 2.33/2gb/5400rpm drive. I plan on using external 7200rpm drives for capture/editing etc. HD from the Canon A1.
Is there any problem with this setup up?
My Sony Vaio 1.8/1gb/4200rpm drive Centrino works just fine with Vegas 7 (a little slow but it gets the job done). I plan on using FCP on the MacBookPro. Advice would be welcomed.

I've had nothing but problems with my macbook pro and firewire as from the sounds of it have other people. Do a search on here. You'll probably have a problem trying to capture to an external drive because from what I've read in macs all the firewire and usb ports run from one bus so you can't use multiple things such as camera and external hard drive at the same time. Someone correct me if I'm wrong so I can get mine fixed than

Kevin, with all due respect to you and the trouble you are having with your MacBook, it's true that the firwire ports share the same bus but not the USB ports. They have their own. ALL Macs are like this. You can add another bus on the MacBook by getting a FireWire card for the card slot. However, I've only had one problem daisey chaining FW devices on my Macs and that was with a 800 mHz G3 iBook that I had a LaCie drive, LaCie Super Drive and Canon Optura Xi hooked up to. I had to try a couple of different arrangements but found one that worked from there on out.

John, a 7200 rpm system, if you are talking about replacing it, will help a slight bit but may not be worth the hassle of disassembling and voiding the warrantee of your MacBook. I replaced the 4200 rpm drive in my Mac Mini G4 and it showed a significant improvement.

Regarding a capture drive, technically, FW 400 will work with a 5400 rpm drive, and I've used them before, but a 7200 with an 8 mb cache or larger works better in practice.

John: check out "barefeats.com" for some useful hardware test results. In particular try these links for starters:

http://www.barefeats.com/hard56.html
http://www.barefeats.com/hard71.html
http://www.barefeats.com/hard74.html

At the first and third links above, note the comments about using Firewire 800 drive connections versus Firewire 400.