External Hard Disk

[Spawnof]

Is an external hard disk (connected via USB2) going to be sutiable and fast enough to playback video stored on it?

[dafyd]

not necessarily - i would recommend using a decent external hard drive connected via firewire as a scratch disk. if you're only accessing small amounts of video at a time, though, usb 2 should be ok. definitely dont use usb1.x though... far too slow!

[tomd]

Depends on quality (bitrate) of video, as you can stream video smoothly over the internet (a much slower connection) but it's rubbish. Consider a removable hard drive caddy (http://tinyurl.com/5fotr), with XP you can just drop disks in and out and it fits into a 5.25" rack (same space as a CDROM drive) Access speed will own you as well.

[Mattk]

why not a normal internal hdd ? a fraction of the price and easy to install