Good Day Awesome People!!
So I long story short my Disk space is running out, and I have an external 2TB Hardrive which can Read & Write at 40 MB/s, would this be fast enough to edit 20 MB/s bitrate videos without or with proxies and not stutter?! I was unable to find the Disk Drive speed requirements for Vegas Pro 19 Online so that is why I am asking here, your help is greatly appreciated.
Have a wonderful day Peeps!!
I'd spend the money on NVNe drive(s) inside the machine for editing and use USB, eSATA, Thunderbolt, etc drives for archiving. The worst aspect of rotating disks is seek time, then interface latency.
I want to add: use ordinary hard drives, not SSD, for archiving. I prefer WD disks.
Jøran Toresen
Do you only use one track at a time? Do you only use that media? I think you would benefit from something faster with a portable SSD for working projects being ideal. I also use external HDDs that are USB 3 for editing 8 bit AVC files.
external 2TB Hardrive which can Read & Write at 40 MB/s, would this be fast enough to edit 20 MB/s bitrate videos without or with proxies and not stutter?!
Videos are measured in Mbit/s so 20Mbps equals 2.4 MBps, so your drive is fast enough to edit . If your video actually is 20MB/s (170Mbps) that might be cutting it a bit close. The drive speed is a bit suspicious, if you are using a USB2.0 port, connect to USB 3.0 if drive and computer supports USB 3.0
Could see a slow down in encoding when you're both reading and writing to the external drive and the fps is high enough such as from hardware encoding. Not sure if you'd see a slowdown with building proxies, it wouldn't be due to the combined speeds of reading and writing. Vegas proxy creation is very slow, but access speeds could slow down due to having to read and write at same time, the same with waveform and thumbnail creation.
The solution is simple: copy some of your media to the external drive, create a new project in Vegas, add media from the external drive and start editing, render to the external drive. If it works, it works. If not, buy an external SSD. Or if possible, add a second internal SSD.
Jøran Toresen
Average Sequential Read/Write speeds like you reported are pretty unrevealing. It is the sustained minimum bidirectional throughput that matters in editing.
I have some older 5400 rpm drives that are about like yours and they work pretty well with 10-12 Mbps video.
I use generic SATA 3 300MBps-rated drives for 20-40 Mbps editing such as yours. They are really cheap this year!
Please always stay aware that 100Mbps = 12.5MBps in the common genre.
I promise that you do not have any 20MB/s videos unless you own a PXW-X400KC over SDI; those would be 1.6Gb/s
Here is an oldie but goodie for benchmarking your sustained drive speeds, and doing quick cluster checks.