Thanks. My exact forum search was "best hard drive."

Thought that should do it, but didn't find any of these threads.

The discussion and the topic don't quite match up here.
The answer to the topic question is, "Usually not." It depends entirely on your source media, which you've not mentioned.

Source media is 4K and all different resolutions from the GH4.

I have now ordered a new WD 7500rpm Black hard drive based on the discussions in those threads. If I should have gotten higher speed hard drives like I was willing to do, I'm gonna be frustrated.

What 4K bitrates are you getting?

[EDIT] I just found my answer. If you are shooting full 200 Mbps you may be testing your bidirectional headroom a bit, but I can't imagine that would be the only bottleneck you would encounter in editing 200 Mbps source.

Better to proxy edit in that case. Everything else, 100 Mbps and below, "should" be fine, assuming the rest of your system is up to snuff.. My advice is cautious for practical reasons.

The OP's late mention of his editing footage in 4k speaks to a whole different issue than just what harddrive is specified on the given platform. At any rate given the best of practical processing - the OP has to be concerned with workflows of proxies to be of any real benefit to the editing experience.

Well, I'm maxing my 24 gigs of RAM when trying to render so proxy editing sounds advantageous. I've never had to deal with this, so it's all new to me.

Okay guys, so knowing I'm editing multiple tracks of 4K video 100-200mbps at a time with BCC9 OFX involved, should I have faster hard drives than 7500? Is it advantageous and/or worth the price?

As I said, it might make a difference, and there are other, probably more significant challenges you will be facing. Let us know how it works out.

If you have the cash just get a Samsung 850Pro 1TB drive and be done with it. The 3D NAND has incredible performance and endurance. No mechanical drive setup will come anywhere near the random read/write performance of an SSD and especially this one. Sequential throughput also saturates the SATA buss.

As for endurance, you'll get at least 6000 writes out of the drive. Which would be like writing a TB every day for about 15 years. A TB, or 1000GB per day, everyday, is quite a bit, even for heavy editing. And remember, only the writes count when it comes to endurance, not the reads.

Just suggesting a huge SSD for a drive and thinking that's going to solve problems is plain idiotic and reckless. The SSD drive will do little for your eventual workflow and that is a fact. You are into a domain where processing is king, not the harddrive.

Now if you are just after sure increase in speed the way a hot rodder puts a 4 barrel carb atop the engine to throw away more gas down the manifold throat - then go for large SSD drives in raid config 0. You will get harddrive speed - but what will it do for your workflow, sir?

A 1TB Samsung EVO drive will set you back around $440, for $260 you can get a 4TB WD Black drive which has a sustained sequential throughput of 171 megabytes per second or a Hitachi 7K4000 4TB drive with +160MB/s for $167. SSDs make sense for system drives, not so much for video data drives.

+1 John. For best processing power you need the best CPU you can afford, fitted to a recent model motherboard and a moderate sum of RAM. My OS and backup drives are SSD, but it gets very expensive to put large projects on an SSD, even more so if you are working in 4K.

@VideoITguy,

The OP wrote that his drive failed and was looking to get a new drive and was considering an SSD. My opinion, idiotic and reckless as you said, was only suggesting a 1TB SSD would be a good option if you want a simple (no raid hassle, complexity of setup, and reliability issues) solution that is very fast, especially when accessing a project with many small clips which might require good random access speed.

Of course a drive generally increase preview (in most cases) or rendering speed.

I don't appreciate my comment being called "reckless and idiotic."

You are implying that I'm a reckless idiot. Uncalled for.

Happy Holidays.

Mark

Mark,

Don't take it personally: he does it to everyone. The French have a great word for what is lacking: https://www.google.com/search?q=savoir+faire&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb=savoir faire[/link].

John,

You are right. Even at my advanced age of 49 I still get my feathers ruffled too easily.
Thanks for the reply.

Mark

The advice is the problem, not the person. I take issue with short-handed advice and it still has not been clarified to really solve the underlying problems that the OP intends to invite on himself.

A 1 TB OS boot drive isn't necessary, much less an expensive SSD.

"The French have a great word for what is lacking: savoir faire."

The DSM-V has even a better word imo . . .

think you mean DSM -IV ?

Okay here is my long, specific opinion on Vegas and SSDs.

Yes, an SSD is a great option for video editing if you can afford it. While it won't improve rendering speed (that is purely compute limited) it will enable your projects (especially ones with many clips) to load faster, it will make multitasking while you are editing much smoother (ie rendering one project while editing another), especially preview. This has been my experience.

As for cost for less than $500 you can get a 1TB SSD which can serve as both OS drive and editing drive with two partitions.

Is endurance an issue? No. Let's take the newly released Samsung 850 EVO which would be my pick if I were to purchase another SSD tomorrow. The endurance for that drive assuming 20GB host writes per day and a write amplification of 1.5. Write amplification is how much is actually written to the drive. The endurance for the drive under these conditions would be 187 years. Increase the daily writes to 100GB and write amplification to 3x and you still have an 18.7year lifespan. In addition after the wear indicator runs to zero there is still much life left in the drive. This is just the point that the manufacturer recommends not using the drive for mission critical work.

Or if you simply need a work drive for less than $100 you can pick up a 240GB SSD to use as a scratch drive.

Again, no it won't improve rendering but my experience is that the overall "snappiness" of Vegas during editing, and especially while multitasking (which happens quite a lot) is noticeably improved.

[I] 1TB SSD which can serve as both OS drive and editing drive with two partitions[/I]

No, not a good idea, even for a SSD. Keep your OS separate from your video drive and if can, have a separate render drive. Even with a laptop, try to use fast external drives when possible.

Do not partition a spinning hard drive unless you are simply using it as folder respository for archiving.

NEVER partition an SSD drive - IT serves no purpose, does not produce any results for anything that leaving the SSD drive native won't accomplish.