Most FW hard drives have two FW ports so they act as a hub so you can connect both the camera and hard drive at the same time. I also have a 7200 rpm drive and cannot capture reliably directly to it but have never encountered a problem editing files on it or exporting them to iDVD. As long as I take the extra step of capturing to the internal drive and then copying to the FW drive I encounter no problems. Gerhard Kuhn suspice at hay.net