First off, welcome to the forums!
The idea of using removable discs is a good solution to your problem. However, given the nature of the majority of removable HDDs on the market, they tend to be ill suited to video editing as they typically can't sustain the high data transfer rate required in editing. Now this isn't a problem during everyday editing, but encoding and capturing to external HDDs does tend to throw up dropped frames.
If your students are experiencing dropped frames, the easiest solution would be to capture/encode to the internal drive, then transfer to the external. Make sure the internal drives are in tip top condition by regularly defraging and cleaning up unused files. The same goes for the external drives!
Get your students into good habits by insisting they keep their files organised and tidy and the discs clean and defragged. You'll be amazed at how many problems this avoids.
You may also consider making your students save a back up of their project file on a seperate network drive. Although they'll lose their work if they lose the captured clips, if they do mess up/delete the project file etc, they'll always have a back up!
Additionally, are all the PCs the same? Have students installed exotic codecs on some? Are they using DV or more heavily compressed video in editing? How full are their drives? You may consider locking out installation of addiotinal software/codecs etc if you haven't already.
In summary, I've a feeling your students' problems are more a case of bad housekeeping - a problem known to us all and easily avoided!
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