Video Editing hard drive setup

[bridgyguy]

Hi, i want to open a Topic regarding Hard Drive/SSD setup for new Video Editing computer, but not sure which forum section i should place it.

Thanks in advance.

[Selur]

first thoughts: general discussion seems fine,...

But what should the discussion really be about?

Disk speed is mainly important during:
a. muxing and extraction
b. indexing a source
c. scanning a source
(especially if you handle large files)
during the editing itself (and encoding) disk speed doesn't really matter that much.

Disk space requirements strongly depend on the tools you use (and whether they create huge temporal files) and the general workflow.
If you handle large files you need disk space.
If you need/want fast access to multiple projects you need disk space.
(A editing machine should not be a tuned up storage server,..)

Without properly stating what you understand under video editing ageneral advice is probably:
Use an M2 SSD for the system and then either large SSDs or large HDDs (in RAID0 then for speed) depending on your budget and storage requirements.
So if you can afford lots of for example 4TB SSDs use those. I also would use separate media for source, temp and output.


Cu Selur

[bridgyguy]

Hi and thanks for the reply, i am building a brand new editing PC for my Son, now that he is doing a lot more editing work as part of his freelance Cinematography work.

His current PC was built 3 years ago, having an 8 core AMD processor, 64gb of ram, an MSI 1080 graphics card, as well as a 512gb NVMe windows drive, 2x 500gb SSD's and 2x 4tb hard drives, but i am not sure how he has the drives set up for running his editing work using Resolve and Premier.

He shoots a lot using his Blackmagic Ursa Mini Pro G2 camera, as well as other high end cameras that might be supplied by the production companies that hire him, what they might be i have no idea, and i am unsure right now of what recording format he shoots stuff in, with his Ursa G2 i think he might record in one of the BM Raw modes, as well as one of the higher end ProRes formats.

He does his editing mostly using with Resolve and Premier, any other info required for this topic i would need to get from my Son.

I just want to make sure that the drives that i buy for the new PC are suited to his needs and work flow, but rather than buy hard drives and set them up in some kind of RAID configuration for speed, i am prepared to buy the best/fastest available single drives (SSD's) for getting the best possible results from the editing work.

The following is roughly the drive setup that i was advised by someone some time ago, before my Son got more involved in Editing his projects, but i lost contact with this person so that is why i have come here to see if what this guy told me is something that i should follow, or change it.

Budget is not an issue here, and i can change the 2tb SSD's indicated below to bigger ones if his needs require them, the same goes for the windows NVMe drive.

The reason for using the Hot Swap drive bay is because he wants to retain his orange Aerocool DS mATX Cube case, and it is not that big, and he wants to be able to remove or swap over drives easily, rather than have to open the case to do so.

https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=600&area=en