Hi: just got a 17 inch Macbook Pro with FCP studio, and I plan to edit HDV footage ... what do y'all recommend to get for an external firewire drive to capture footage to and use for editing? I'm guessing I'll need a minimum of 300-400 Gigs.

Read my suggestions starting at the bottom of the first page of this recent thread:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=71235

G-Raid. Best hard drives out there.

I have used Firewire 400 and 800 drives; both bus powered and not. THey all work to some degree. How long they work is a factor. Heat is the enemy of drives and electronics used inside the enclosure. I had a WD 250GB drive lost due to the enclosure's circuit board.

The G-drive is an example of a drive engineered for long reliable use. You get what you pay for. SOme drives have active fans for cooling, others are designed with aluminum heat sinks to provide passive cooling, while others slam the drive into a cool looking plastic case. You get what you pay for. Another professional line manufacturer I know of is Glyph.

Wiebetech.com carries an interesting variety of affordable external drives. They have outstanding presales and post sales support. I use a Tray Dock system from them that supports removable 3.5" drives. It supports both IDE and SATA drives (different trays of course). So with one enclosure, I can shuffle drives in and out with a $40 tray that is hot pluggable as well. It's a passive system but if you upgrade to the two bay enclosure, you get an active system.

I'd recommend a Firewire 800 system if your computer supports that. The performance improvement will be felt on your whole workflow.

Epilog: I just setup my daughter's college bound laptop with two Newer Ministacks. THese are very cool running units with variable speed fans and an aluminum heat sink on the bottom. They also provide USB and Firewire hub functionality. Other World Computing has them on sale.