Accessing Media Over LAN

[Yansky]

I'm about to buy a second PC that will be an "editing only" pc and I would like to use my current PC for compositing and effects.

So my question is thus; Will a gigabit ethernet connection between the two pc's (no router/switch in between) be fast enough to allow me to access the editing pc's hard drive from the compositing pc as though it were a regular internal hard drive? i.e. without any lag in response time.

[CrayonEater]

Yes. At GbE speeds, the hard disk on either end is likely to be a more limiting factor than network speed, so accessing a network drive will be about as fast as accessing an internal one.

[Yansky]

Yes. At GbE speeds, the hard disk on either end is likely to be a more limiting factor than network speed, so accessing a network drive will be about as fast as accessing an internal one.

Cool, thanks.

[rallynavvie]

Throughput maybe, but your access times are going to suffer. The only thing I used my GbE network for was transferring files from my two workstations for editing or encoding over the network because then your processing speed is actually the bottleneck.

I tried editing a remote file with Premiere and it did not like me for it at all. It took much longer to jog the file around.

However if you're using any sort of nested array or FC drives then your GbE network is still the bottleneck.

[TooLFooL]

just a tip... map a network drive to the folders you wish to access. mapped drives respond quicker than simply accessing them from 'network places'.

[rallynavvie]

And it makes things a lot simpler.