Question about capturing a miniDV footage

Hello,
I have to capture 15 hours of footage from some miniDV tapes using a old Sony DCR--TRV30E camera and a recent MacBook Pro.
The internal disk of the MacBook will probably not be able to hold so many hours of video.
Is it ok to use a USB external disk (Iomega)? Good enough for capturing? I also have a Firewire disk but there is only one Firewire 800 port on the mac, and of course  it will be taken by the camera.
What is the best strategy?
Many thanks for your precious advise.
Best

Yes. Digits are digits. Firewire is preferred because the USB2 protocol uses data packets instead of the data streams that Firewire uses. There is no video quality difference between the two, only suitability for the bandwidth and delivery demands editing places on the media drive.
Once the material is captured, you can easily make a back-up copy on the USB drive should your main editing drive become corrupted or fail.
You should be doing this as a normal best practice anyway, even more so if you feel the material will not be recoverable if the drive should fail.
Firewire drives are cheap, you should keep a clone of both your computer drive, and another clone of your media drive as hard disk drives will become corrupted and fail usually at the worst possible time.
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/EliteALmini/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB
MtD

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    Message was edited by: Jerry Hofmann

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