hey all,

Capturing HD video on my laptop is a little sketchy dropped frames as it only has one drive, partitioned but, still - and working with editing it gets a bit sketchy also.

So I want to add and external drive to start to clean things up. I have only one FireWire port on the laptop.

I have an external drive question: looking at this for instance:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=6538&A=details&Q=&sku=447584&is=REG&addedTroughType=categoryNavigation

It is FireWire capable, cool. So when capturing can I hook up the hard drive to the laptop via a USB cable, and my camera to the HD via the Firewire and control the camera when capturing. Then capture straight to the external drive?

If I can't are there tricks of the trade to capture to the laptop that only has the one drive? Then after just move it over to the external when I want to play editing games.

Thanks,
Pea

Yep, that should work fine!

Playback from the external should also be a little smoother as you will then be using two seperate physical drives instead of just one.

I capture all my footage to externals that way depending on how I am feeling, I can edit at my main PC or relax on the bed with my laptop.

Just a personal observation...
I have had poor luck with the Maxtor drives failing quite early in their lives. I have had much better luck with Seagate external driives. I actually use two on my laptop. They are both firewire and usb. I connect both up usb and use one to capture to and one to render to and hook my camera up to the firewire on the laptop to capture from. No problems.