Whats the best portable drive for use with iMovie?

I use iMovie on my macbook on my long commute to and from work. I have read that the best solution is to edit movies on an external drive and not the one on the mac.
What is the minimum drive speed (rpm) and minimum transfer (firewire 400 ? usb 2?) for this to work.
All the drives on the online apple store talk about transfering documents, photos and using them as backup devices and I am trying to be cautious about what I buy given a limited budget.
For example is the "Iomega 160GB Portable Hard Drive with Dual Interface" suitable ?
All advice gratefully received, thanks

I haven't seen that point.
I worked on my old iMac using just the hard drive for a while. Performance is not the issue, but space can be, which is why I moved to an external drive.
Drive performance is complicated. If you have enough memory, your internal drive will probably have better performance than an external drive. The SATA bus is a lot faster than the FireWire or USB buses.
On the other hand, if you are memory constrained and are using other i/o intensive applications at the same time, the external may perform better. You definitely want to avoid excessive swapping of your virtual memory while using iMovie or anything else. (and this is best handled by having sufficient RAM. I have 2GB.
In iMovie 08, once you have your video imported into an event, you can edit away, because iMovie is just writing pointers in the project file to the source files in the EVENT. Disk performance is more critical on import (front end) and sharing or rendering (back-end), but internal drives are more than up to this task.
Space is the issue. If you are shooting high definition footage, you can get event files of 20GB to 40GB+. That can eat up a laptop real quick.

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I can't tell you if it is the "best" hard drive for you to use with TM, but I'm quite happy with the 500 GB Buffalo Technology DriveStation Combo TurboUSB I bought recently. It is quiet, quite inexpensive for the capacity (I paid about $120 for one on sale at Fry's), & completely compatible with OS X & TM.
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What is best hard drive to use with Time Machine?

I was using a WD Passport 2TB external drive for my Time Machine backup for iMac which has a 3TB drive. The drive is almost 1 year old and only bought it to for backing up with Time Machine. The drive failed when I tried to restore a iPhoto database to my iMac on Sunday. Today on Tuesday evening. Time Machine said it could not perform a successful back up due to Disk Failure. I ran the disk utility and it gave me error. I had to erase and reformat the drive.
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WD commercial drives for consumers are the worst, as meant their "green / blue / red" series.
The best are Hitachi and Toshiba both statistically and otherwise.
BEST FOR THE COST, Toshiba "tiny giant" 15mm thick 2TB drive (have several of them, lots of storage in tiny package)    $100
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio-Connect-Portable-HDTC720XK3C1/dp/B00CGUMS48     /ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1390020791&sr=8-3&keywords=toshiba+2tb
best options for the price, and high quality HD:
Quality 1TB drives are $50 per TB on 3.5" or $65 per TB on 2.5"
Perfect 1TB for $68
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio-Portable-Hard-Drive/dp/B005J7YA3W/ref=sr_1_ 1?ie=UTF8&qid=1379452568&sr=8-1&keywords=1tb+toshiba
Nice 500gig for $50. ultraslim perfect for use with a notebook
http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-Canvio-Portable-External-Drive/dp/B009F1CXI2/ref=s     r_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1377642728&sr=1-1&keywords=toshiba+slim+500gb
*This one is the BEST portable external 2.5" HD available that money can buy:
HGST Touro Mobile 1TB USB 3.0 External Hard Drive $88
http://www.amazon.com/HGST-Mobile-Portable-External-0S03559/dp/B009GE6JI8/ref=sr     _1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1383238934&sr=8-1&keywords=HGST+Touro+Mobile+Pro+1TB+USB+3.0+7 2 00+RPM
Most storage experts agree on the Hitachi 2.5"
Hitachi is the winner in hard drive reliability survey:
Hitachi manufacturers the safest and most reliable hard drives, according to the Storelab study. Of the hundreds of Hitachi hard drives received, not a single one had failed due to manufacturing or design errors. Adding the highest average lifespans and the best relationship between failures and market share, Hitachi can be regarded as the winner.

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Congratulations on your graduation.
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All this can be done in the time of you waiting around for a few people to chip into this thread.
Good luck.
x

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HT2477 what is the best external drive to use with time machine?

I already have an external hard drive that I use to backup anything I want to then delete from my macbook air. I also use Carbonite to back up everything on my mac. I am looking to switch to Carbonite to Time Machine because it's free. Can you recommend a drive? How do most people use TM? Do you manually back up once a day or do you set it to constantly back up your files?
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ttp://eshop.macsales.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=adwords& gclid=COCM8O3uuLsCFSUOOgodVBEAOwuuLsCFSUOOgodVBEAOw
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Whats the best portable drive for use with iMovie?

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