new hard drive...

[nissmo300]

Hi I want to get a new hard drive... give me some advice on the following:

WD 74GB 10,000 RPM SATA

or WD 250GB 7,200 RPM SATA vs NON-SATA

by the way I dont have SATA connections. I will need a new MB but is the speed a big difference switching to SATA because the WD Raptor comes only in SATA.

[Capmaster]

If you plan to work a lot with video, always go with the higher spindle speed, all other things being equal. In your case it sounds like you're considering a huge 250GB that's slower than the 74, but very large. The 74 is a speed-demon but you'll need a new MB or a SATA add-in card.

The choice should be easy once you consider what you're going to be using it for. If you plan on doing a lot of editing and immediately burning them, go with the screaming-fast 74GB. If you plan to keep them a while and do some occasional editing, then go with the 250GB. Good luck

Edit:
This is a bit off-topic, but I'm planning a new machine at home in the near future. My work PC is a 3GHz Xeon HT and it has a Seagate 15K HD on a SCSI Ultra320 interface. I've never been much of a SCSI fan, always preferring IDE in the past, but I think this machine has made a believer out of me, and I think I'll pay the extra for one at home (they are much more expensive than IDE: 73GB is $582). But they are insanely fast. When I defrag it the drive makes what sounds like musical notes from the head moving around so fast. I think I'm in love with this type of drive, and I want one for my video editing. Now, if I can just save up enough .... 8)

[rallynavvie]

Sounds like the machine I'm putting together. Fortunately you don't need all SCSI in your computer. I just have a couple of U320 15krpm 18GB drives that I used for scratch space as they work really well when editing pieces of video from them. They're also good for encoding to/from when keeping up with dual Xeons. Helps to have the SCSI support onboard as I think that gives you and edge bypassing the PCI bus. PCI-X would help I think.

As far as those SATA drives I'd go for the larger one over the faster one. SATA 7200 works fine for video work and the extra space is worth more than the small performance increase you'll see from the faster drive. Uncompressed video takes up a lot of room so having plenty of HDD space is a good idea.

[Capmaster]

I agree that a mixed IDE(ATA)/SCSI machine is probably the best of both worlds, and I had planned a larger, slower, IDE drive like maybe 120GB or so to boot from and for storage, but I wanted the fast one for capping and editing. of course I work with MPEG and not DV, so I can afford to sacrifice space for speed. If you're working with uncompressed video(124.416 Mbps) that means you need even more space than DV demands. That's an unbelievable amount of data That's 15.5 megabytes per second ....933 megabytes per minute and 56GB/hour! You must have a mongo IDE drive to store all that

[SLK001]

You need to report the sustainable writing rate. If you are doing video, about the maximum needed is for uncompressed 720x480 resolution, 24bit RGB at 30fps, or about 31MB per second. If your drive can maintain that rate, then it is okay. The blazingly hot speed is not really needed for video.

[rallynavvie]

I have 200GB IDE drives in swap trays that I use for archiving customer projects and some of my own. I'd invest in a tape drive but with the price of IDE drives what I'm doing is more practical. I've got 1.2 TB of disk space (only 480GB installed permanently) but at the rate I'm growing I'll probably have twice that in 6 months. I think I need to enforce limits on my archiving, or charge more