Second hard drive: capture only? or capture and encode?

[jcat]

I have a 40G internal HD, which clearly is insufficient for the stuff I want to do. Can I get a second drive and use it for both capture and encoding? Or is it better to have a drive dedicated just to capture, and then a third drive (maybe external?) for authoring, encoding, storage, etc? Could I partition the drive and use one partition for capture and the other for encoding?

And - does anyone have any HD suggestions? All I know I want 7200 (I understand buffer size isn't that important for huge files). The internal/external debate wages on, but it seems I can't go wrong capturing to an internal drive. I've spent a lot of time poking around this site, but just about every brand - Maxtor, WD, quantum, IBM - seems to have many detractors and complaints - drived failed in less than 3 months, etc. Is there *any* reliable brand of HD?

[Metaluna]

Seagate drives are generally very reliable. I don't hear people complain about them as much as Maxtor, WD, IBM, etc. They're quiet too.

In general it's best to have a separate physical drive for sensitive operations like capture and burning. This is because your primary drive (i.e. the one that holds the C: partition) can often have bursts of activity due to OS housekeeping tasks like reading/writing the swapfile or launching a program, which can result in dropped frames. I would try to keep the capture drive as free of other files as possible. If you can't do that, then at least defrag it before you start the capture. After that you can go back and forth between drives as you go through your encode/author process. For example I capture on drive E: and then encode back to drive D: (which is physically on the same drive as C: ). Then when I author I write the VIDEO_TS folder back to E:. Then I can burn directly from E:, my capture drive, or I can use ImgTool to make an .iso file back on D:. I usually clean up my E: drive before the next capture. Moving between drives like this tends to be faster and result in less file fragmentation in my experience.

[jcat]

For example I capture on drive E: and then encode back to drive D: (which is physically on the same drive as C: ).

Is this just a partitioned drive? What advantage does partitioning like this offer?[/quote]

[SaSi]

Buy yourself a new drive and make sure it's a 7200rpm model.

Choose a fairly big capacity and divide it into two partitions. Use the first for capturing and the second for authoring, re-encoding, etc.

Using the first partition for capturing is important. Now matter what make of drive you get, what capacity or what speed, the first half of the drive is at least 30% faster than the second half. This is because of the geometry of the drive and the amount of data that can fit on a single cylinder.

Note that Hard disks are "recorded" from the outside to the inside, so the linear velocity of the outer (first) cylinders is higher and more data sectors fit in a single cylinder.

Also, needless to say, use NTFS for the filesystem, unless you want to have trouble recording longer than 4Gb video.

[Metaluna]

Yes I have two drives...one has two partitions, C: and D:, and the other has a single E: partition.

The advantage of having two partitions on the primary drive is that you can keep your OS and programs on C:, and all your user datafiles (e-mail, documents, etc.) on D:. That way, if you ever need to reinstall your OS, you can just reformat C: and do a clean install without touching any of your own personal data. It's more of a convenience thing and is not directly related to capturing or video applications. I usually do the same thing on any new PC I set up.