There are possibilities to attach an Express card or cardbus eSATA to your notebook and use a 4 disk RAID0 array in an external storage enclosure, this can handle the data rate and allows for sufficient storage capacity for long shoots, but the practical problem in the field is power. Do you have an AC outlet? The second problem is of course portability.

Practically speaking this works well in a studio, but not in the field, meaning outside.

i shoot with an canon xh a1 and i need the portability..specially for the bushwacking i do on the olympic peninsula or vanouver island outer coast. i have thought of trying something portable...but i generally burn three of four tapes. i just hope the software will catch up to hdv soon and there will be less concern about the highly compressed codex that needs to be converted. i am absoutely green on the editing end. bill

The Canon A1 has no way to output uncompressed HDV. If you want a solution just to capture use DV Rack or OnLocation and a simple eSATA drive. Look again at a previous post with the thumbnail attached. It explains it reasonably well I think.