Hard Drive Suggestions

[tmann]

Hello,

I've been doing a lot of reading about how to best alleviate the bottleneck that seems to occur at the hard drive during video capture and editing. There seem to be a number of philosophies, not to mention this stuff can be pretty confusing in general. So, I've come up with a couple different options for the Dell I'm about to purchase and I'd like some advice:

1) 240 GB RAID 0 (2 x 120 SATA HDDs)
Under this scenario I would have the OS, applications, and video data all on this RAID.

2) (2) 120 GB Serial ATA HDs
Under the scenario, one drive would be for the OS and the other will be for video data. Should I install the video editing, rendering, etc applications on the same HD as the OS?

I'm looking for the fastest solution here -- the prices of the 2 aren't really all that different. While I've read that 2 HDDs is great, I've read that RAID 0 is quite fast -- so I'm confused.

Thanks,
Tommy

[Craig Tucker]

A regular 7200rpm EIDE drive is plenty fast enough to do video capture without dropping any frames. SATA or RAID is not necessary for video capture. What I would advise is 2 seperate drives (whichever drives you choose) one for the operating system and software, suggest you partition it and keep the OS partition fairly small (10-20GB is plenty) and one drive for dedicated video capture.

[Shudder]

Definitely go with 2. As mentioned, the OS should be fine with 10-20 (I think mine's 15).

You'd probably be fine doing all your aps on the first one and doing all your work on the second. I'd use all the remainder of the first drive to store all your stuff that you won't necessarily be editing.

[northcat_8]

Do you know what RAID is?

RAID stripe 0 actually shares the info equally across both drives, so if one drive is lost half of the information is lost.

I would certainly not suggest RAID stripe 0 for a OS drive.

There are other types of RAID stripes 1, 5 research it. One is where the drives mirror the info on the other so if one drive goes down you have an automatic back up.

ANYWAY....

I work with a great deal of video and since buying a new MoBo with on board RAID (I have a stripe 0 set up with 2 - 80 GB Maxtors) a few years ago. I strongly suggest that you have your OS on a different Hard drive.

My set up is a 60 GB OS drive, My RAID (160 GB) is my capture drive and my 120 GB Maxtor is my finished video drive.

When working with video you, specifically capturing video, you want to avoid capturing to your OS drive if you can. It's not necessarily a HD issue, it is a IDE Channel issue and the I/O over that channel. While you can get away with it sometimes don't complain when you are experiencing dropped frames and jerky captured video or intermitten sound.

With the 2 choices you have listed I would most certainly go with option 2. You do not want your OS on a RAID. But I feel I should tell you that since I now have RAID I would never go back. RAID is definitely the way to go if you are going to be doing a high degree of video stuff. I turn out about 4-5 original DVD videos per week. Weddings, births, graduations, highlight films, etc. If you are just messing around with your own home video and aren't going to be doing a large quantity then 2 regular HD's should be OK.

Make sure they are NTFS file system, you need that to get around the 4 GB limit of the FAT32 system under XP.