Those of you who edit frequently in the field, are you using the laptop's hard drive as the scratch and storage disc or do you use a standalone firewire/usb drive?

I thought I read someplace that it was better to use a standalone drive, so the laptop's drive won't get clogged up with huge files, but I can't find that reference so I'd like some advice from those that have experience in this area.

Thank you

Yes Bob, use a separate dedicated media drive. For performance reasons, using the internal startup is never advised regardless of available disc space. For remote field editing you'll want a good fast external firewire drive if bus power is needed (ie powered directly from the firewire connection to the laptop) or an eSATA drive provides even better performance if bus power is not the issue. You do NOT want a USB drive. USB transfers data in 'packets' not a constant stream, this makes the current implementation highly unsuitable for video editing needs (unless you don't mind dropped frames). Good recommendations include Sonnet's Fusion F2 (eSATA AND bus power!), Lacie's Little Big Disc Quadro and G-Technolgy's G-RAID mini
Sonnet - Fusion F2: Portable RAID SATA Storage System (http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusionf2.html)
LaCie - Little Big Disk Quadra - eSATA 3Gbits, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 (http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11087)
G-TECH G-RAID-mini High Performance Portable RAID Storage System (http://www.g-technology.com/products/G-RAID-mini.cfm)

Hi there
I do all my editing field or home on a Sony 17' Vaio loaded with Premiere Pro 2.0.
I always download the video files via firewire onto an external hard drive, usually a Maxtor or Lacie. USB 2.0 is fine I find.
I have recently steered away for the massive 750 gig drives as I've had three pack up on me thus losing my projects...
I now favour a couple of small 250 gig drives that are now so small they fit into my laptop case...
I hear all the posts on super fast powerful pc's... well my humble Vaio does SD and HDV just fine... even if it is very slow to render out an After Effects project, especially if I use Magic bullet...It does have difficulty playing back uncompressed AVI files or HDV projects.. but as all my stuff is either encoded to Mpeg2 or WMV its not really an issue. The day I need full HD play back I guess I'll have got a new computer any way...(probably be a Mac though)

Regards
Gareth

Thanks for this information. I have two follow up questions:
1) from reading the specs, it looks like I'll get faster transfer speeds using eSata, but that will require an Express Card adapter. Is that correct?

2) Why (if you know) are these things so expensive. I have a Western Digital 1 Tb drive (wtih eSata-never took notice of it until today) that I use to backup my desktop and that was only $249. The LaCie is more than twice as expensive. Why?

Thanks again

Yes Bob, use a separate dedicated media drive. For performance reasons, using the internal startup is never advised regardless of available disc space. For remote field editing you'll want a good fast external firewire drive if bus power is needed (ie powered directly from the firewire connection to the laptop) or an eSATA drive provides even better performance if bus power is not the issue. You do NOT want a USB drive. USB transfers data in 'packets' not a constant stream, this makes the current implementation highly unsuitable for video editing needs (unless you don't mind dropped frames). Good recommendations include Sonnet's Fusion F2 (eSATA AND bus power!), Lacie's Little Big Disc Quadro and G-Technolgy's G-RAID mini
Sonnet - Fusion F2: Portable RAID SATA Storage System (http://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusionf2.html)
LaCie - Little Big Disk Quadra - eSATA 3Gbits, FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 (http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11087)
G-TECH G-RAID-mini High Performance Portable RAID Storage System (http://www.g-technology.com/products/G-RAID-mini.cfm)

Ok. I get part of the price difference. My WD is more than twice the weight of the LaCie. And considerably larger than the Sonnet.