Workflow Question on Writing/Deleting/Rewriting to Hard Drive

[Unagi]

Muddled title, I know.

Probably a really newbie question, but which of these two workflows is less taxing on the hard drive and are there any other benefits/problems 'tween the two? Other options?

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The first is writing video files up to about 500 Megabytes, excising clips here and there, deleting the original file, and then repeating the process. Sometimes the whole file is deleted and a new one immediately writ.

The second is writing a LOT of these video files, sorting through them pulling what I want, then deleting all the original files.
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Basically... is it better to write a file, delete it, and rewrite immediately again (repeating over and over), or is it better to write a lot at once and after dealing with them delete the whole batch? I'm most curious in the effects on a hard drive, but other bits of information would be appreciated too!

[EddyH]

Because of fragmentation issues, I'd suggest that - if you can afford the space and clutter - you go for the latter option.
It won't really have too much "effect on the hard disk" (if you mean wear and tear etc) as they're built to withstand it, but it WILL have an effect on your file read/write speeds, amount of noise coming out of the machine, quite possibly your sanity when the whole system slows to a crawl...

Nowhere near as bad under XP (2000/Vista/7... or modern flavours of linux) as it was with 9x and earlier, but it's still possible to get some horridly fraggy files that drop your RW speed from the usual 40-50mb/s down to 1/10th of that or far worse (pathological-case scenario being something like 0.5mb/s, but I doubt this kind of work would provoke that).

However if it's going to make you very low on space (less than ~5% of the total drive OR <5gb) I'd probably plump for the former instead, because the OS is going to start chopping the files up and putting them wherever anyway once all the large contiguous spaces are used up.

I've hit both of these phenoms in the last few weeks, doing a mega project that's pushed both my internal and external storage near their limits at points. If you're simply muxing and chopping rather than re-encoding, your upper speed limit is likely set by how fast you can get things on and off of the hard disk, rather than your CPU speed, so it becomes very important.

...and I tell you now, trying to get anything at all done with a PC late at night when even the CPU can't do a great deal of anything because the bus is tied up with a squillion seperate tiny high-latency DMAs rather than a few big fast ones... you wanna smash the thing to bits. Waiting more than a minute for a window to open is supremely unfunny and has a big effect on your workflow and productivity.

[lordsmurf]

It's really nice to see that more and more people are looking into workflows.

People are finally using the right words, too!

I've been doling out DVD Project Planning aka Video Workflows advice for years now.

[Unagi]

Many thanks, EddyH! I was thinking that deleting and rewriting over and over would be inviting fragmentation. The workflow of writing/deleting/rewriting was something I really wanted to get straight in my mind because it will help me figure out a lot of other ways to conduct my video work! I don't think I'll have to worry so much about reaching capacity, but thanks for the anecdotal information on that, too.

(Thanks for the link, lordsmurf - I'll be sure to poke around that forum section a bit this evening!)

[EddyH]

Agreed, having spent about 4 weeks so far on a project that tots up to 40 minutes of output material, nearly forgetting about a followup one and having to haul ass to cover it... mine probably needs some optimisation. Assuming I'm understanding what you mean properly.

Granted, one of the weeks was spent trying to use a broken piece of software (Pinnacle v10, which I've now heard being bashed vs v9... wish I'd known) and probably at least another solid 5-7 days in learning/relearning a lot of techniques... but probably half of the rest went in tail chasing and unneccessarily doing things multiple times - or individually when they could have been batched with other similar actions.
That and a hard disk (er... disks... and more than just a pair) that's now in utter disarray from stuffing in a load of new programs and tons of datafiles in odd places. Bit of a panic ysee