Editing from External Hard Drive

I am putting together a video and have initially saved all my work to an External Harddrive connected via Firewire. However, in the editing process I am noticing that simple edits, undo's, etc. are hanging up and the video is sound and video is extremely slow. Should I be editing from my main HD instead of the external...could that be slowing down the response? If so, can I simply save the project to my main HD and get better response. I started from the external just to try to maximize free space on my main drive. Thanks for any insight, Chris

FireWire was designed for DV editing. You're using the right type of drive.
You could double-check your Energy Saver System Preference setting. If your media drive is spinning down, it will cause sluggish performance.
Go to Apple Menu > System Preferences, then choose Energy Saver from the Hardware row. When this loads, make sure that "Put hard disk(s) to sleep whenever possible" is not selected.
Something else to check is your media drive's capacity, paying close attention to the amount available and the amount used. Most hard drives lose bandwidth as the drive becomes full. For optimal drive performance with digital video, 80% to 85% capacity is a good rule of thumb. For DV work, your drive must maintain a sustained data transfer rate above 3.6Mb per second. Select your drive in the Finder and choose File > Get Info. You'll find capacity, available and used in the General section. Benchmarking utilities like XBench can help you test the drive for read (playing video) and write (capturing video) speeds.
-Warren

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