[davidf77]

Hi,
All hard drives in the mini are rated at 5400 rpm. This being the case, what is the suitability of this unit to capture video? I know I'd have to get an external converter and firewire it to the Mini. Also is firewire 400 OK to use in this way?

Thanks.

[bausman]

I think firewire 400 is fine for video and you will probably be OK (not great) for video at 5400rpm but I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some frames drop or sketchy performance. For music and/or video, it is best to use a hard drive that is not the system drive running the OS. When the OS *needs* to write/read to/from the disk, it is going to - the request for video will be pre-empted and you may see a pause - quite annoying if you are going to be doing a lot with video.

If you are going to spend money on an external firewire interface, I would buy and external firewire hard drive also for your video. Since it only has 1 firewire port, you would need an external firewire drive that has a second port on it to chain another device downstream. The nice thing about the external drive is you can take the video with you to playback on another machine elsewhere (assuming iMovie or identical softare on other machine.)

If you are doing video for fun, occasionally, then the mini will probably be fine. Apple advertises editing video on it from their website so it will. If you are going to be doing a lot, I would consider a more powerful machine and at the very least an external hard drive dedicated to your video.

I hope this helps