Does it help to have an external hardrive

Madmardigan wrote on 12/13/2001, 8:52 AM
Is there a benefit to having an external harddrive? As you may have seen, I am having a devil of a time editing video. There seems to be some relationship between hardrive access and video quality (i.e. I see the access light come on on my computer case at the same time there's a "blip" in the video/audio).

I have a 40gb internal harddrive divided into 2 partitions both fully optimized and neither over half "full". When I finally get around to rendering, I would of course be rendering to the same physical disk I am reading from. It's this that makes me think I should be using an external h.d.

Could using virtual memory contribute to poor results?

Whatever...I could sure use your advice.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 12/13/2001, 10:07 AM
Hard drives are an issue when you're capturing video or playing back/
printing to tape. These are "real time" operations, and your computer
must keep up with the video data stream at all times without skipping a
beat (so to speak). A 7200RPM drive with DMA enabled should be able
to handle this even if it has a moderate amount of fragmentation.

However, rendering is not a real time task. Your computer can take as
much time as it needs, even waiting for the drives to find more free
space or flush their buffers, and it will not affect the quality of the output
file. You could render your output to floppy drives connected through a
modem and still get perfect files (well, ok, BIG floppies, and it would
take years ... but the point is it would still work).

However, that being said, there are still advantages to having more
drive space, whether internal or external. If you only have about 20GB
free on your drive, then you can only store about 95 minutes total of
DV video. This time includes both the captured files and the output
files. Depending on the size of your projects, you might find yourself
having to completely finish and purge a project before you can start
another one. This can be cumbersome.

Probably one of the nicest things about having an external firewire drive
is that you can carry your project with you and work on it on a friend's
computer, or just transfer tons of files very quickly.
wvg wrote on 12/13/2001, 11:37 AM
It is nice to have one of those external firewire drives. I've got a Maxtor 80GB and love how fast it is. It can move a 400MB file in about a minute. If you do or plan to capture video you will get better performance and will be less likely to have frame drop if you set aside a partition on a seperate physical drive apart from your operating sytem and where your other applications are stored.

I mostly make VCD's and only have one large 60GB interal drive set to a small 5GB partition for the OS with the rest set aside for installing applications, data storage and rendering. Works fine for me.

Have you run scan disk on your drives? If you've had a hang or suffered a recent power outage or didn't shut down normally, even if none of that is true... you could have cross-linked files or lost clusters. Scan disk fixes most of these problems easily in a minute or two. If you haven't defragemented your drive recently... do it!

Are you sure your hard drive is running up to specs? If you've installed a newer IDE drive of the Ultra 66 or 100 variety you should be sure your BIOS supports it and the settings are right. Ditto for the IDE bus mastering controller. I had a devil of a time burning CD's making lots of coasters until I updated my IDE bus mastering. Lastly I've seen Windows turn off DMA. Most drives will run without using a DMA channel, but they will crawl. Check using Device Manager and see if your hard drive is using a DMA channel.
Madmardigan wrote on 12/13/2001, 1:54 PM
Thanks very much to both of you! I will do as you suggest and will very probably buy a Firewire external drive. I've been told that it may help to increase my RAM from 128 to 512mb. I'll be doing thatas well. So.....:-)