7200pm external hard drive for 13 inch macbook pro

G-Man

G-Man

Well-known member
Hi,

Don't know if this is a silly question or not, but if I purchased a 13 inch 5400rpm macbook pro and a 7200rpm external hard drive, would I be fine for basic editing of 1080p hd footage? I was thinking about just editing off of the external hard drive. I wouldn't be doing any heavy graphics or effects work on the laptop.

I would like to go portable and would like to just keep projects on an external drive and plug it into my mac pro desktop when I'm at home, and to a laptop when I'm away. I'd like to save the extra $800 for getting a 15inch laptop with a 7200rpm internal drive and I don't know if I want to replace the 5400rpm drive that would come with the 13 inch laptop.

What do you guys think, would it do the job for basic editing?
 
FW800 I'm hoping?

And what codec for the footage? Pro Res, DVCProHD, etc?

Finally, a 5400 rpm boot drive is fine, and you don't want to edit off the boot drive.
 
FW 800 7200 external will be sufficient for editing pretty much anything in my experience. I generally work off my Macbook Pro, but I did put a 7200 speed boot drive in there as well. But all my footage / projects / scratch disc data sits on a number of externals (either a 500 gig 7200, or a 1TB striped Raid @ 7200) and the disc access speed never poses a problem when it comes to editing.

I'd love to use a nice 250 gig solid state drive as my primary editing drive (ditch the dvd drive in my macbook, and replace it with the solid state) but until OS X supports TRIM, I don't know that the benefit would support the cost
 
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