External and internal HD working together for speed??

[SEALs1230]

I dont know too much about computers and many people, if this is wrong, will look at me and say what a stupid !#$@. Anyways, I have an internal drive as well as an external on my laptop. I heard that when I'm doing editing if I input from one of these drives and output to the other, this can speed up the process a little b/c it prevents bottlenecking of data going to and from the same source. How true is this?

[redwudz]

It's generally true that having two drives will speed up data transfers during editing. But if your external drive is operating much slower than your internal drive, you may not see any improvement.

You can download something like SiSandra to check the speed of your drive's data transfers.

http://www.overclockersclub.com/downloadcenter/download.php?action=file&id=12

[edDV]

Also,

- during capture you are only using one drive.

- during editing again, you are playing from a drive and displaying on the monitor. A "render" creates a new element in slow speed on the drive. When it's time to record to an external device. Its a single playback to a stream.

Only so called "realtime" cards need to run multiple realtime streams. In that case, you need a RAID. This isn't what you have.