Hard Drive Speed and Video capture/editing

[Bill Hark]

While looking a laptops, I have noticed that many of the "thin and light" models (including ones by Sony) have hard drive speeds of 4200. Is it still possible to capture video and do some basic editing with hard drives of 4200 rpm. I don't plan on editing chase highlights but would like to put together segments of storm video on the road for posting or to be sent to TWC or other outlets.

Bill Hark

 

[John Diel]

Seems like "most" video capture companies recommend 5600 rpm as a minimum and some are 7200. At least the ones I looked at were that rate.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I upgraded my hard drive on my Dell laptop to the Hitachi 7K60, which is a 60gb drive with 7200RPM. The performance gain from the previous 4200RPM drive was quite noticeable, mainly for those applications that relied heavily on data write/read...

 

[Andy Wehrle]

My laptop has a 7200 RPM hard drive and still hiccups a lot at capturing and editing video. I wouldn't want to even try on one with anything less.

 

[Tony Laubach]

I have a 5400RPM hard drive in my Compaq Presario and it works just fine! I've captured, rendered, and edited video with no issues what-so-ever. I also have a gig of ram and an AMD64 processor which I'm sure helps the cause!

 

[Bill Hamilton]

I have imported and edited video from my miniDV camcorder using the Firewire port and I have had no problems at all and it had a 4200rpm hard drive in it (it has a 7200rpm drive in it as of tonight). Factor like processor speed, memory speed & amount, Firewire or USB and system cache play a factor it it as well.

 

[Jeff Snyder]

I agree that there are MANY factors involved here that could affect this process (hard drive rotational speed, front-side bus speed, processor, RAM, etc). However, having the fastest hard drive certainly wouldn't hurt. I would say that, more important than hard drive speed IMO, you should really try to have as much RAM installed as possible. I'm currently at 1GB, and would like to go higher if not for the very high prices of 1gb sticks for my laptop (512mb+512mb currently -- only two slots).

 

[Shawn Rutherford]

No problems here

I run a stock 40gig in my laptop and I KNOW it's not 7200 but via firewire, I have not a single issue... I can even run the WMV HD files on it with almost no issues.

I also have plenty of Ram (512m) and keep my setup pretty lean... nothing running in the background.

Shawn