Just curious the consensus of another new plan, since the HD footage consumes so much hard drive space:

Could I ingest HD footage, edit, author and burn, all from portable drives connected via usb? I have a handful of 300-500 GB portable drives and also a pair of powered external drives.

Portable drives are usually not 7200 rpm. USB is also not the fastest interface. If it's USB 3 and you know the drives are 7200 rpm, then you could probably get away with it. Always make backups though. I've seen lots of 2.5" hard drives fail.

Great, thank you! I am now assuming our computer drives are 7200 and we need to at least match that? My laptop has firewire, perhaps a portable drive 7200 with firewire?
?

I have several older but still reliable portable drives which are 7200's. I wouldn't think of using anything less today. AAMOF I have 2 newer ones sitting on my desk as we speak along with 2 older ones. I use them for backup as well as storage for graphics etc. Some are FW some are USB 2/3 all work quite well although the USB do seem to be a bit slower for ingest than the FW but I've never put a stopwatch to them. FW drives are getting a bit harder to find, seems most now are USB. Some will give you the option of either/or.