4200 RPM Hard Drive

Hey, my system has a Toshiba 4200 RPM hard drive. I've recently entered a film degree program that teaches you everything from the ground up and we are going to start filming and editing on our computer systems soon.

I was wondering, would I be able to transfer the miniDV footage from the camera to the computer without losing any frames or it taking too long? I'm just wondering because on these forums I am seeing discussions of getting a 7200 RPM hard drive because of these said reasons.

In addition, I have a Western Digital 5400 RPM External hard drive, but connected by USB. Would it be wiser to do my extraction on that or stick with the hard drive in my laptop?

 

4200 rpm is slow. You can compare the transfer rates (internal vs. external hard drive) and select the option that works best for you. Overall, you are probably better off upgrading the hard drive. What are the other specs of your computer?

 

Toshiba p35
3.07 GHz Pentium 4 HT
1.5 GB of RAM
Ati Radeon 9700

Bought the system a year ago, I do plan to upgrade when Vista, DX10 and similar supporting cards become commonplace and I can get a deal on a new laptop.

However, for now, I only hear bad things about 4200RPM being slow. But, to myself, when I slapped in a nice Gig of RAM in this thing, the load times for games and under 30 seconds although the boot time for the computer can sometimes be noticably slow (when its showing windows xp icon).

Basically, I know people talk and say anything that is 2 generations old (basically one year in computer terms) is bad, but I don't find myself sitting around getting frustrated at the load times for things like Photoshop Graphics and basic editing, creation and compression (that takes a lot of number and hard disk crunching) of images.
I've tried a 5400 RPM on a friend's computer, I only see a difference in the things specified by about a 10 second reduction in load time.


But, is it that 7200 RPM is so detrimental to video transfer, that I must replace my 4200 RPM with one?

 

7200 RPM hard drives are much better for video editing.

The 4200 RPM hard drive is slow...you'll realize it once you switch to 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM.

 

I have never had a problem with my machine doing video editing with Premiere 6.0. I only have problems when you try to get a file that is half my 40gb hard drive to convert/ edit. I would recommend going with the 7200rpm drive, but I nave never had a problem with my 4200, just in capacity.

 

Well i got 100GB on the 4200rpm and 80GB on the 5400rpm.
If you say you don't get any real limiting problems because of the speed then I think I'm good with this setup until I plan to sell this laptop and buy a new one next year.

Thanks for all the help guys.

 

Just try it and see. If you feel that things are going too slow for you then upgrade. It will be a waste to drop the cash on this HD, when you will be getting a new notebook soon. All of the other specs should compensate for the HD being slow, maybe not as well as one could hope, but at the very least, I think it will be bearable until you get a new one.