Drive Speed for Off-Line?

I just started testing the Cinewave off-line editing. I using an older firewire drive for my offline editing. I have the resolution set to 25% and also have additional items on the drive. I have a couple of questions.

1) Will a new 7200rpm LaCie 80gb drive with 35 mb/s give me better throughput? (Is this a Oxford chipset?)

2) Is there a way to see the output on a NTSC monitor while playing on a Ti notebook while using the Cinewave extension?

Thanks everyone.

Justin Allen