Help Configuring Hard Drives for Video Edi

Profiler wrote on 9/5/2011, 12:33 AM
Hello everyone!

I'm hoping that someone can offer some guidance. Yesterday I ordered a new high performance desktop from Dell. My reason for doing is is that I'm going to be using it primarily for video editing and my current system isn't powerful enough to handle things well. In addition, the new system will handle all of my other work tasks such as email, document creation/management, accounting, etc.

After ordering, I realized that the 250GB hard drive that it ships with is probably way too small. The good news is that this box will hold up to 4 internal drives. I plan on adding at least one, possibly two additional drives.

I know that video editing can be a real task master on system resources, so I want to set things up for optional performance.

So, here's what I've been kicking around inside my head. Should I . . .


•Use the 250GB drive that it ships with to install all of my programs and install an additional large drive - between 500GB and 1 TB to store all of my data? I'm thinking about redirecting the "My Documents" path to this additional drive.



•Would it make sense to install two additional internal drives - one for any data I create such as videos, documents, etc. and another to store all of my video production stock footage like music, backgrounds and other elements that tend to quite large in file size.



•Or should I just call Dell back and see if I can get catch them before it ships and upgrade to a 1 TB drive and call it a day.




I've heard many different schools of thought regarding maximizing speed and efficiency, but I'm not quite sure what makes the most sense. Some folks have told me that having only software installed on a smaller bootable drive reduces read/access time of the drive. Others have said just load everything on one monster drive.

I'm interested in any an all opinions, especially if you are heavily into video production.

Thanks in advance!

Comments

Birk Binnard wrote on 9/5/2011, 1:01 AM
Editing is not the biggest resource hog; rendering is. The best way to render is to have your input files on one drive and your output files on a separate drive, ideally connected to a different ATA header from the input drive.

If you are rendering HD/Blu-Ray stuff keep in mind that a Blu-Ray disk is about 25GB, so if you plan on making several of these you will need a really big output drive. I use a 1TB external SATA/Firewire drive, but I also keep both the rendered video files and the ISO file used to make the Blu-Ray disk.

Overall the single biggest performance improvement you can make to a Windows system is to use an SSD for the boot drive. This has nothing to do with editing or rendering however and is really a separate issue.
Chienworks wrote on 9/5/2011, 1:20 AM
Leave the My Documents directory on the system drives. Best way to handle My Documents is to simply not use it. *NEVER* put anything related to your media production in there.

Those who are ultraconcerned about shaving every last millisecond off of their rendering time will install two additional high speed drives. Use one for the source media and the other for the rendered outputs. Personally i think this is bunk. The real amount of time saved is an extremely tiny fraction of the whole rendering time, not enough to be noticeable. However, this isn't to say that more drives isn't a good thing. Compared to the cost of the rest of the computer hard drive space is quite cheap.

What you don't want to do is buy tiny drives like 1T. That's a huge waste of a drive slot. Get the largest drives available that don't go over the ramp on the size/price curve. 2T drives are only a few dollars more than 500GB, so go for at least 2T. Believe me, you'll use it faster than you would ever imagine. If it was me i'd start off with two 2T drives right from the beginning. Use the first one for everything except video editing,

If you're concerned about data safety, get four 2T drives and use RAID0 mirroring. Each pair of drives will be mirrored together and automatically be exact duplicates of each other. That way if a drive goes bad, there's still a safe copy of the data on the other drive. Replace the bad drive and the good data is copied back to it.