Hard drives and free space?

vicmilt wrote on 6/10/2007, 8:17 AM
Hey all -

Traditionally, you'd leave 15% to 20% free space on a hard drive when you were loading media and such.

But that was in the days of 40 and 60 gigabyte drives.

I've currently loaded up a 500Gig SATA drive to 95%. Sounds like a crowd, but that's still 25 Gigabytes of free space.

Comments? Input? Suggestions?

v

Comments

riredale wrote on 6/10/2007, 9:35 AM
I think you're right; even a 1TB drive 99% full still have room for 10GB of data. But keep in mind that a drive that full will have a hard time defragging, and also you'll be working with the slowest inner tracks.
Chienworks wrote on 6/10/2007, 12:37 PM
Defragging isn't an issue. Don't worry about it.

Do keep an eye on free space. While 60GB drives* may be a thing of the past, so are projects that we kept on 60GB drives. I can eat up 50 gig an in hour of experimenting and then forget i left those files lying on the drive. Then i'll go to capture something thinking i've still got tons of free space on a 300GB drive only to discover that it's full already.

If you absolutely must defrag, well, you're probably wrong and you don't have to. But if you decide you want to do it anyway then my suggestion for the fastest, safest, and easiest defrag is to copy all the files to another empty drive, then when you're sure the copy is ok format the first drive. Lots faster than any defragger program, never puts data in jeopardy, and works well no matter how full the drive is.

*This made me laugh. Just last weekend i found a bunch of older drives on sale for minor pittances at Wal*Mart. I picked up a 160GB drive for $35 and an 80GB drive for $24. I'm building up a new server so the 80GB will make a good boot drive and the 160GB for user data. I'll add a couple 500GB drives later for media storage. A friend of mine asked me why i didn't get the other 3 80GB drives that were on the shelf since they were so cheap. I said, "well, except for an OS boot drive, i can't think of a use for anything that tiny." She got annoyed as she only has 60GB total available.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/10/2007, 1:50 PM
i keep my drives as "clean" as possible. why? Never know if there's something I'll want to put on there & need the space.
FuTz wrote on 6/10/2007, 3:38 PM
Speaking of space, how many Go do you get with these Sony mt2 files for a one hour HD tape capture ?
I may need some extra space I guess ...

Edit: Go=Giga octets... Giga Bytes.
My mistake!
Chienworks wrote on 6/10/2007, 3:53 PM
"Go"? What's that? I'm guessing GB (gigabytes) ....

HD files use about the same bitrate as DV, so about 13GB/hour.
FuTz wrote on 6/10/2007, 4:02 PM
Yes, GB that is (sorry, Go is in french and I skipped on this one).

I would have expected much more space since that guy who is editing with FCP just told me that he eats up 60GB / 1 hour tape.

How come it's almost the same as DV since there's more definition (or information) involved?
Chienworks wrote on 6/10/2007, 5:03 PM
DV uses very "gentle" compression, about 8:1. There's also no temporal compression; each frame is unique.

HD uses MPEG2 at about 48:1 (kind of a guess there) and uses interframe interpolation so that lots of the frame information can be derived from previous frames.

I'm guessing that the compression level for HD was more or less arbitrarily set to match the bitrate of DV so that existing systems could handle the data rate. If your computer can transfer DV in real-time then it can transfer HD in real-time too.

Now, what a lot of people do is convert HD .m2t files into something like cineform for easier, faster editing. these files are more like DV than MPEG and require much more space. This step is optional, but if you have to handle HD editing faster it can help a lot.
vicmilt wrote on 6/10/2007, 5:20 PM
Yeah, but can we get back "on point"?

Do I really have to leave 75 Gig unused?

Or does the new media allow a lesser percentage usage?

v
Serena wrote on 6/10/2007, 5:30 PM
Vic, don't need to leave so much "empty".
TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/10/2007, 5:34 PM
you can fill it up if you wanted, doesn't mater as long as it's not a temp drive for anything.

but when the drive's full there's no room to put things in the recycle bin.
riredale wrote on 6/10/2007, 6:11 PM
So who needs a Recycle Bin? I have it turned off for all drives except the C drive, and have it set at 1% for it.

Also, near as I can tell, HDV takes up slightly less than DV over time. I estimate 13GB/hr for DV, and 12GB/hr for HDV.

vicmilt wrote on 6/10/2007, 7:19 PM
Erasure is not an issue -

the process is as follows:
These drives are "outboard" loading media only - no calculations whatsoever. They are attached to the computer as outboard drives on SATA.

The edits are all being done on a 1 terrabyte raid... SATA.

I am going to leave 15 gigs on a 500 gig media drive (as above) free, and see how it all works.