what is the best kind of HARD DRIVE for video?

[portrower8]

What is the best kind of hard drive I should get for video stuff?

I have windows 2000, 512mb ram, 2.8ghz anthlon

[Capmaster]

A fast HD. Fast and large.

Try to get as fast a spindle speed (7200 or 10,000) and as large a cache as you can find ....also called a buffer. Get one with a 4 or 8MB cache, or larger if you can find it.

Get one with a fast interface. Ideally for IDE you want SATA. If that's too steep for you, go with the fastest standard Ultra DMA IDE interface you can get. But don't go below ATA133.

The absolute best, fastest, rip-snorting HD you can find for PC video work (within reason) is a Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 SCSI 15,000 RPM. Even better to RAID0 three or four of those. There is no finer. But it's expensive and its controller is expensive.

And this is really a computer question, so I'm moving it to the Computer forum

[holistic]

What is the best kind of hard drive I should get for video stuff?

There is no best kind.

First define the video work you are doing.

RAW captures , DV transfers , *cough*DVD backups.

RAW 720*480 is over 30Megabytes a second (refer : *** )
DV is 3.7 Megabytes a second
and ripping a DVD will not stress even a 4 year old harddrive.

The thought process that you must have the biggest , fastest , mostest drive is FALSE.

A 5200rpm 160 Gb drive will transfer data just as fast as a 7200 120Gb drive. What makes the difference is the aureal density.

***To calculate data rate:
1. Determine the size in kilobytes (K) of one frame of uncompressed video: Use the following formula:

Frame size K = ([Pixel Width x Pixel Height x Bit Depth] / 8 ) / 1024

where 8 is an 8-bit byte, and 1024 is the number of bytes per kilobytes. For example, the size in kilobytes of an uncompressed frame of full-size (720 x 480), 24-bit video is

Frame size K = ([720 x 480 x 24] / 8 ) / 1024 = 1012K

2. Determine the file size of one second of uncompressed video: Multiply the frame size by the number of frames per second (fps). For example, one second of uncompressed, full-size, full-speed (30 fps), 24-bit video is

1012 K x 30 = 30 MB

[stiltman]

The absolute best, fastest, rip-snorting HD you can find for PC video work (within reason) is a Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 SCSI 15,000 RPM. Even better to RAID0 three or four of those. There is no finer. But it's expensive and its controller is expensive.

I would go with RAID 50 (aka 03), but you do have the right drives

[rallynavvie]

Pretty much any old 7200 RPM drive will do. Video isn't all that intensive unless you're doing tranparent mixes between 4 different streams. Single stream video is pretty easy stuff. Access times are nice when doing a lot of cut editing/mastering.

[Capmaster]

The thought process that you must have the biggest , fastest , mostest drive is FALSE

I didn't suggest he did need the best, fastest, fire-breathing drive there is. Rallynavvie is right. Any old reasonably fast IDE drive will do nicely. Most of my video work was done on a 4500 RPM laptop drive. But the question the topic posed was:

what is the best kind of HARD DRIVE for video?

In my mind, that rules out "adequate", "good enough" or "this'll work fine", and instead asks "What is the best".

Did I misinterpret the question?

[portrower8]

holly cow... I never heard it explained so well....

all the feedback is good. I especially never understood video/hd space relationship. The formula helps a lot.

my struggle is that I am slowly putting something together to play with on the side over the years. I don't know what the next thing I need is. I have an 80GB hard drive and a 120GB hard drive and find myself already running out of room. so I was thinking I should get one of those next... but just didn't know which to get.

I imagine I need more RAM too.

The question was...."what is the best kind of hard drive for video" but I really should have explained myself better and asked instead, "what is the best kind of hard drive for the video stuff I want to do"

I'm not going to make movies like a real movie maker...my wife would kill me and no one would watch them. But I do have a desire to turn old family movies into DVDs, take all my old rowing photos and make an alumni DVD...later on something for recruiting... and little projects on the side like that.

[Jayhawk]

But I do have a desire to turn old family movies into DVDs, take all my old rowing photos and make an alumni DVD...later on something for recruiting... and little projects on the side like that.

I'm in the middle of what has now become a 4 month project turning my wife's VHS and 8&16MM stuf into DVD's. I agree that speed has not been a factor (I'm using Western Digital 7200rpm ATA100 drives with 8mb cache). Size however has been. I started with a couple of 60gb hard drives and have now swapped out both (with another machine) just to get 80gbs per drive. One spindle holds the original captures and the other the "ISO" images I will make family copies from. Of course everything sits until my wife approves, makes DVD covers, etc. Both are pretty much full. Thankfully, this is all on a spare machine so it doesn't impact my regular machine. If I had it to do over, I'd start with twin 160's or 200's.

[dj4monie]

Yeah for my upcoming project, I'm going to upgrade to dual 200GB drives now that WD and Maxtor 7200rpm 8MB buffer drives are now right at or under $100 each.

400GB of storage should be PLENTY. I'll make my current 60GB and 10GB drive external drives with kits for Scratch Live! and other stuff I have brewing.

I agree 5400rpm drives work just fine, at least it did with my old Rage Pro AIW card.

[overloaded_ide]

My opion of best is the lowest cost per gig basically, and sticking with Maxtor.

Other brands are good too, but Maxtor I never had a problem with yet and about all I will use now. WD I liked, but seem to have a bit of problems with those.

I stick with 7200rpm 8mb cache 3year warauntee Maxtors for ATA133. And I watch for deals. A PCI controller card was about $30-$40 and I have plenty of bays, why pay more for a large drive when I can have 2 smaller ones for equal size or more for less money. Also they won't both die at the same time, if one ever does die. I still have an old 8GIG maxtor I use in one of the systems.

It's faster working with several drives anyway. Read from one and write to the other. When authoring a DVD or re-encoding files to a new format I go from drive 1 to drive 2 and it seems to be faster than doing all the reading and writing with just one drive.

Plus much much faster to defrag a drive by just copying all the content from drive 1 to an empty drive 2 and then deleting drive one!!
An empty drive is not fragmented, writing all the data from a fragmented drive to an empty drive results in continous data (no fragments). So in some ways the largest is not the best!

I just defraged my main system. It took forever to defrag a 60gig (boot drive) but my video drives were even worse fragmented and went pretty fast! I copied all the stored files I wanted to keep from G: to F:, deleted everything I did not want, then copied all files back again. No fragmentations. That was 120gig and 160gig drives. Both were defraged that way in far less total time than the 60gig took.

I decided I needed to defrag the video capture drive when I dropped 64 frames!!! That's not alot for a 2hr movie, but I NEVER drop frames! Not even one. Now I don't drop frames anymore again!

[Faustus]

BIGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

Beyond that usually the overall system bus keeps things from getting out of hand and overloading the drive.

Also I find it helps a bit to encode from one drive to another. Beyond that just get some good 7200rpm 8mb cache drives and call it a day.

[Capmaster]

BIGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

Beyond that usually the overall system bus keeps things from getting out of hand and overloading the drive.

Also I find it helps a bit to encode from one drive to another. Beyond that just get some good 7200rpm 8mb cache drives and call it a day.

I'll add to this and recommend if you're encoding, have two big drives ...one on primary and one on secondary. The disk-to-disk transfers are much faster that way

[Bandarlog]

The advice to use two separate HDs for "encoding": is it the same for re-authoring?

[Faustus]

The advice to use two separate HDs for "encoding": is it the same for re-authoring?

Well if your authoring then eventually there is usually (I realize not always) and encoding step involved somewhere.

Otherwise just worry about size and getting a good 7200rpm 8meg cache drive, the other componets will keep you from maxing out the drives speed 9 times out of 10.