that'd be wicked awesome. the transport could take a 500gb hard drive =). anyone know?

Never though on this, but its a great idea, I think anyway. Should be able to dissasemble the firestore and run a cable out to a 3.5" ata drive so long as you used another power supply for the drive.

Anyone want to try?

Or do you mean uncompressed to a drive?

3.5" is light enough. the problem is the sustained transfer rate of uncompressed 1080 HD. i've been reading up on it since i made this thread and it sounds to me like the transfer rate is upwards of 150MB/s. no single 500GB can do this currently. max transfer rate of any single HD (even scsi) is around 60MB/s with sustained rates lower (around 50ish). so unless this "portable" box is capable of making 2 or 3 of the 3.5" drives raid0 and eek some performance out of it... i dunno. not really feasible&that's why no1's made one yet. but i think it could be in a portable and cost effective way.

3.5" is light enough. the problem is the sustained transfer rate of uncompressed 1080 HD.

Okay, but what if you could record directly to a minimally compressed codec like Prospect HD or Avid DNxHD? Now add an HD-SDI input and the necessary circuitry to do all this on the fly, hook it up to a Canon XL-H1, and you could record nearly 7 hours of theater-quality 1080i 4:2:2 footage from a portable setup costing (hopefully) under $15K including the camera. How cool would that be?!?