I'm running it just fine on my new MBP (15" 2.33GHz C2D, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD). I was color corecting some B-Roll stuff earlier off of a external FireWire 800 drive and I had zero problems with drive speeds.
JohnMC
BTW, how did you get FCP to install on a plain old MB? Apple does not support the GMA 950 for FCP Studio. 😱
Mine is the 200GB drive, which only comes in a 4200RPM drive. There is no 5200RPM hard drive. It runs great. What more do you need to know??? You shouldn't be using your internal drive to capture video in the first place. You should ALWAYS use an external firewire drive as your scratch disk. That doesn't mean that you CAN'T use your internal drive, but it's certainly not the ideal workflow.
Digital video takes up 13GB/hour...do you really want to bog down your HD with that much storage need?
Capturing to the drive you have your system on can cause problems due to the nature of the filesizes your working with.
Always keep you project file seperate from your footage. You can always recapture your footage if you lose the files, but you can never get your edit back if you lose that. FCP project files are a few MBs MAX, you should ALWAYS back those up on a regular basis.