Practically speaking why should I have 2 hard drives...

[xinjingqiao]

Practially speaking why should I have 2 hard drives when I am doing editing? I understand the theory. Practically speaking is there a significant time savings or quality improvement? or more stable system?

T

[Snakebyte1]

Its for performance reasons. Having a drive for your OS and a separate physical drive for your data will allow your editing/rendering etc to be completed faster. Your system will be more responsive.

It will not have any impact on your quality, but should save you time.

Of coures the amount of time yor save depends and varies. If your are working with large video clips and applying extensive transitions and effects you'll likely notice a difference. But if you are only working with small clips and not a lot of transitions/effects you may not notice it as much.

[svcdmaker]

Depends on the type of editing you are doing.

If you are rendering/transcoding from one format to another then performance gains in having two drives will probably not be seen. You are CPU bound at that point.

If your edits are within one format (eg. MPEG2 trimming/ commericial removing with a suitable program such as VideoRedo) then two disks will give a sizeable performance boost as long as you are reading from one and writing to another.

It was a long time ago that I did some time trials and found that there was an additional small benefit depending on if they were on the same IDE chain. I do not remember the results.

Karl

[INFRATOM]

also read
https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=282133

[rkr1958]

For me another and better reason for having a second harddrive separate from your O/S and applications drive to do your video work on is to prevent fragmentation and corruption of your O/S & applications drive.

[Richard_G]

It also means that when Windows throws a wobbly and screws up your operating system to such an extent that your machine won't boot, you can simply format it and start again. If you've saved video to it that makes life just that little bit harder.

Seriously, the main reason is that all sorts of things are happening on your operating system drive. This can cause problems during capturing/transferring if the data flow gets interupted. Keeping the OS and the target drive for your files separate should virtually guarantee you'll never drop a frame.

[pepegot1]

The most important reason is for a BackUp Image. This way if your system disc fails you can restore to a new drive. There are other ramifications also. I would not think of having a computer without a sound BackUp system-thus two drives, or you could even use an external drive to complement your system drive and data drive, if you wish. That is unless you are thrilled by a complete new installation. Also, many other good reasons were given above

[akrako1]

Also, make sure to have your 2 hard drives hooked up to two different IDE channels (different cables). That way, both drives can we accessed simultaneously (reading and writing). If drives are on the same cable (master/slave) then they share a channel, and can't read/write at the same time.

Tip: you can also increase your system performance by moving your paging file over to your 2nd drive as well...

[rkr1958]

It also means that when Windows throws a wobbly and screws up your operating system to such an extent that your machine won't boot, you can simply format it and start again.

The most important reason is for a BackUp Image. This way if your system disc fails you can restore to a new drive.

Excellent point guys. I put my O/S & applications on a 15-GB partition of one my drives. I use both RestoreIT and Norton Ghost on this partition to keep this backed up.

[ntscuser]

Tip: you can also increase your system performance by moving your paging file over to your 2nd drive as well...

It's a good idea to do that as soon as you install the second drive as that way:-

a) It can be accessed much faster

b) There is far less chance of your paging file becoming defragmented at some time in the future

[oldfart13]

...only 2? I have 4 on my PIII system. Great for saving video files since I do so many DVDs every week...

[redwudz]

Four for me also. OS, EDIT, VIDEO, ARCHIVE (backups and extra programs storage.) But they are all 80Gb as I got a good price on them at the time. All SATA

[edDV]

Practially speaking why should I have 2 hard drives when I am doing editing? I understand the theory. Practically speaking is there a significant time savings or quality improvement? or more stable system?

T

It's not so much about "editing" it's more about stream captures or stream transfers to or from the single HDD.

Stream capture/transfer to a single drive requires the OS to shut up and stop interrupting the data flow. If the OS is demanding the same HDD you are capping to, the OS wins and your capture data spills on the floor while the OS has its way with the drive to do whatever OS's do.

Hardware buffering is minimal and won't protect you from an arrogant OS. Software buffering may work but that is not an included feature of DirectX.

Stream capture has little error correction, very little. Frames get dropped while the OS has control of the drive.

A second internal drive has a dedicated path though the PCI bus (via bus-mastering or local bus routing) so the OS HDD and capture HDD can co-exist.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/mbsys/buses/types/pciMastering-c.html

Once the datastream is captured-transferred to a file, everything changes. Then the OS protects the data and manages a file transfer calling for packet resends if there is a lost data packet during a move or copy.