Should I render to the same hard drive?

[duderdude2]

So I just installed a second hard drive in my video editing machine and was wondering what the best way to make use of it was. I'm already capturing all my video to the second drive, but should I be putting other project media on their too (such as voice recordings, titles, etc)?

Also, when I render the video, should the video go to the same drive as the video, or to the computer's primary drive?

Thanks!

[DarrellS]

Ideally, you'd want a small boot drive (80GB to 160GB), a capture drive or working drive (500GB or higher) and a storage drive (1TB or higher). If your boot drive is larger than 80GB then you could store music and pictures on it.

[duderdude2]

Ideally, you'd want a small boot drive (80GB to 160GB), a capture drive or working drive (500GB or higher) and a storage drive (1TB or higher). If your boot drive is larger than 80GB then you could store music and pictures on it.

Thanks, but I can't really afford a third drive...I'm just curious what the best way to use two would be?

[greymalkin]

Thanks, but I can't really afford a third drive...I'm just curious what the best way to use two would be?

it's always good to have the source video/audio on one drive and set the rendered file destination to the other.

If you're computer specs are right;

i7 2.6ghz
1TB HDD
12GB RAM

Then the "I can't afford another hard drive" line is not. I'm not sure what your overall purpose for the PC is but an extra 1TB hard drive with 8GB RAM would probably benefit you more than 12GB of ram for video editing.

[duderdude2]

If you're computer specs are right;

i7 2.6ghz
1TB HDD
12GB RAM

Then the "I can't afford another hard drive" line is not. I'm not sure what your overall purpose for the PC is but an extra 1TB hard drive with 8GB RAM would probably benefit you more than 12GB of ram for video editing.

Thanks for telling me what I can and cannot afford. The computers were a relative bargain, though are the main reason I have no money.

[redwudz]

Since you don't appear to have options, I would store and render on the new drive. Leave the boot drive for the OS and maybe some seldom accessed archive files.

It may slow down the process slightly, compared to having a third drive, but probably not enough to worry about or even notice. Using the boot drive for rendering isn't usually a good idea as the OS accesses it fairly often and that can slow down those types of processes much more. Capturing is better done with other than the boot drive for the same reasons, but encoding or rendering doesn't use that much hard drive resources, not near as much as capturing. Newer controllers and hard drives shouldn't have that much of a problem keeping up with a relatively slow encoder program.

[greymalkin]

Thanks for telling me what I can and cannot afford.

Anytime

[DarrellS]

I couldn't afford to build a new I7 computer with 12GB of DDR3 memory but I was able to gradually buy seven hard drives, including a 1TB external drive.

How big is your boot drive? you could get a 80-160GB WD for $40 and move the old boot drive to the new boot drive and use the old boot drive for capture and the new 1TB drive for storage. Something to think about for the near future.

[edDV]

With 12GB of RAM you can set up a RAM drive for the render destination. I doubt it would speed things that much but it would be interesting to compare RAM to 2nd disk render time.