How necessary is a separate scratch drive??

Greetings from cold, windy Humboldt,
I'm looking into buying a new 15" macbook pro w/ my student discount and using FCP 5.1 to edit a short film on it. I do not have any form of external drive and quite honestly I won't have any money left to buy one after I've paid for the laptop. My film professor was very adamant about the fact that we could NOT capture video onto the SAME drive that we were editing video on. Why is this, assuming that I have enough space on the single hard drive to capture and edit? I don't want to cause any explosions or hasten armageddon or anything, I'm just broke and I have a deadline that can't wait for me to buy another drive... Could I just edit the film in small pieces and back up the project to data DVDs as I go? And could anyone recommend to me how much video to edit at a time, or what would be the maximum of captured video (miniDV, not HD) that I could reasonably dump on a 160GB hard drive at once and then edit?
Does anyone out there do their editing and capturing entirely on one computer, esp. a laptop? It seems like the powerful new Intel macbook PROs should be capable? Am I missing something?
none yet   Mac OS X (10.4.9)   considering an Intel Macbook Pro 15"

The system drive has to run the operating system, and FCP as well as any other programs you may have open. If you add to that workload the task of capturing footage, you are pushing that one drive pretty hard.
That being said, many people successfully edit this way, but be aware that you risk dropping frames and other problems.
If you do work this way, do not fill your drive beyond aprox. 85% (general rule for any scratch drive) It will probably also help to close all other programs and open sequences during the capture process.
As for editing in "small pieces" that's not really the issue. But if you do want to conserve drive space then I'd recommend logging you footage before capturing so that you can avoid capturing things you do not need.
rh

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