Rendering to an External Hard Drive

drewU2 wrote on 3/31/2011, 8:07 AM

I have been rendering to an external eSata hard drive for a couple years with Vegas because I assumed it was important to have a "fast" (at least 50mbps) drive to render to.

However, I have run out of eSata ports (no space to add any) and I'm wondering if I can simply render to a USB 2.0 external drive that writes about 25mbps. Any thoughts? Would this slow rendering?

Comments

john_dennis wrote on 3/31/2011, 8:57 AM

A usb drive can easily transfer 20 megabytes per second which is significantly higher than most systems need to write while rendering. The cpu is the bottleneck for most systems so the I/O requirement is significantly less than most usb drives can tranfer.

Editing from a usb drive can be less satisfying, but you can still get it done unless you are using an uncompressed format.

johnmeyer wrote on 3/31/2011, 9:33 AM

Short answer: you can do it.

Longer answer: If you are concerned about performance differences, for heaven's sake, do your own test! Render one minute of video to one drive, and then repeat the test, rendering to the other drive. Measure both times with a stopwatch.

The difference in render times between rendering to one drive vs. another (and this includes rendering to the same drive as the drive containing the source media) can be approximated by copying a file of the same size as the final, rendered file. So, if your final rendered file is 3 GB, take a 3 GB file on your source drive, and simply copy it to the eSATA drive. Then copy the same-sized file to the USB drive. The difference in those two times should be approximately the same time difference that you'll have between the two renders. I would guess that the time difference for a 3 GB file will be under thirty seconds. This is probably a trivial amount of time compared to the total render time.