Editing setup for a beginner/amateur

[sailorphyn]

I know there have been other threads on this topic but they are all way over my head!

I'm a beginner/amateur. I want to edit home movies but do a bit more than iMovie will allow. Currently, I have an old MacBook Pro with a 120 GB hard drive (not sure of speed), 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB of RAM. I have a 500 GB and a 2 TB external drive, both G-Tech drives, 7200 rpm and another 1TB Drive of unknown but slower speed. I'm using the 2TB drive both to store video and as my scratch disk, so it's reading and writing files to the same drive, which I understand makes things slower (?). Rendering anything more than a minute or two in length takes FOREVER.

I'd love your opinion about:
1) Why my current setup is so incredibly slow
2) I'm about to order a new Mac laptop (desktop is impractical) and want to know if I should get the 500 GB 7200 or the 750 GB 5400 hard drive option (same price). It will come with a 2.3 GHz processor and 8 GB of RAM. If I'm using an external drive as the scratch disk, does the write speed of my internal hard drive matter?
3) How should I set up my external hard drives for maximum rendering speed. Should I store my video on one drive and use another as a scratch disk? Or use my internal drive?

Thanks so much for your advice! Thank you for using baby words--I'm very new to all this.

 

[bigbossbmb]

-Are you connecting the drives with USB or Firewire?
-What kind of media is it? (ie codec, frame size, and frame rate)
-What kinds of filters/effects are you having to render?

for your future MBP, I would suggest sticking with the stock drive... save the money or apply it somewhere else

store both the media and the renders on the external.

 

[sailorphyn]

the 500 GB 7200 rpm and the 750 GB with 5400 rpm are the same price.

drives are connected with firewire. on media...i need to check.

rendering and video storage on the *same* external drive?

 

[bigbossbmb]

I understand that both of those are the same price... my advice was to just stick with the base drive that comes with it (at no additional charge).

Yes, you'll just have one FW port on the laptop. So you'll just have one external to use for both media and renders. The speed hit shouldn't be too significant. Ideally you would have either a very fast volume or separate volumes, but you don't exactly have that option on a MBP until Thunderbolt devices are prevalent.

EDIT:
I've figured out that you're going for the higher end 15" which has both of those drives as the base option. I would go for the 5400rpm drive simply for power savings (which won't be much). When I upgraded my MBP's drive, I stuck with a larger 5400rpm drive rather than the quicker 7200rpm drive. Just wanted more storage.