Is external hard drive necessary for FCE?

I recently purchased brand new imac with Final Cut Express. It hasn't even arrived yet!!!
Is an external fire wire HD necessary? I plan on editing home movies with approx. 60 Minutes of raw footage at a time and then putting on DVD.
The imac comes with 250 GB of HD space?

If you read the specifications for usb 2.0, it appears fast enough - almost as fast as fw400. However, the key issue is the ability to guarantee bandwidth. There is a technical name for this capability - Isochronous - and USB is not set up that way. Without that dedicated bandwidth capability - video hiccups, stutters, and FCP correctly reports dropped frames. SOME people have made it work, but it really is a gamble and a poor one at that.
x
FWIW -
Isochronous
(from "how stuff works")
An important element of FireWire is the support of isochronous devices. In isochronous mode, data streams between the device and the host in real-time with guaranteed bandwidth and no error correction. Essentially, this means that a device like a digital camcorder can request that the host computer allocate enough bandwidth for the camcorder to send uncompressed video in real-time to the computer. When the computer-to-camera FireWire connection enters isochronous mode, the camera can send the video in a steady flow to the computer without anything disrupting the process.
(from Whatis)
In information technology, isochronous (from the Greek "equal" and "time"; pronounced "eye-SAH-krun-us") pertains to processes that require timing coordination to be successful, such as voice and digital video transmission. A sound or picture going from a peripheral computer device or across a network into a computer or television set needs to arrive at close to the same rate of data flow as the source. In feeding digital image data from a peripheral device (such as a video camera) to a display mechanism within a computer, isochronous data transfer ensures that data flows continuously and at a steady rate in close timing with the ability of the display mechanism to receive and display the image data. (FireWire, the IEEE 1394 High Performance Serial Bus, includes an isochronous interface.)
Isochronous can be distinguished from asynchronous, which pertains to processes that proceed independently of each other until a dependent process has to "interrupt" the other process, and synchronous, which pertains to processes in which one process has to wait on the completion of an event in another process before continuing.
Technical Explanation:
http://www.techfest.com/networking/wan/isoc.htm

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