Definitely the only technical reason for separate drives for source and renders is for better rendering performance. Modern drives are so fast that this benefit is very minimal. Don't worry about it.

Kelly and I always post on this subject. He is, as usual correct, that in most cases the performance gains from using two drives is not huge. This is especially true as the actual CPU time required to render becomes large compared to the read/write time of the hard drive. However, there are situations in which using two drives can make a fairly substantial difference.

1. If you are doing fairly simple editing, so that the CPU effort required is relatively small, then the read/write time of the hard drive becomes a significant percentage, and the difference in using two drives will be obvious.
Why? When using one drive, the computer cannot both read and write at the same time, whereas when using two drives, the computer can read from one at the same time write previously read data to the other. Thus, the read/write time is cut in half.

2. If you use uncompressed or intermediates, then the time it takes to move these much larger files becomes a substantial issue, and therefore the two drive scenario is more important.

If you are dealing with DV or HDV, and rendering to MPEG-2 (which is generally a very small file), you will probably not notice much difference. However, if you are dealing with 100GByte (or larger) uncompressed, or 60 GByte Cineform intermediates, then you will save 10-20 minutes (or more) in a typical operation.

Also if you have a lot of audio tracks each track is one file. A 24 track mix means a lot of head movement and that's what takes time for a disk. If you're writing the result of the mix back to the same disk even more hard work. Modern disk systems use Native Command Queuing which I think is much the same as elevated seek. The idea here is the disk system sorts out the read / write requests so the heads do the least changes of direction. That's perhaps all good for a file server in an office, how that impacts our work I don't know.

One good solution to the audio problem could be the use of polyphonic WAV or BWF files which interleave all the audio track into the one file.

Bob.

There used to be a program knocking about called something like "Interleave" which was designed to interleave project files on disk. It was like a control reversal of defragmenting. It would rearrange the selected files on disk so they were available in small physically adjacent chunks, thus saving head wear and travel time and improving performance.

In a music project, when you are recording multiple tracks at once, I think one of the worst possible things you can do is degframent a disk.

Defragmenting is one of the worst possible things you can do in any circumstance.

I have a better suggestion. Post your system configuration and maybe we can make suggestions for adding more hard drives:

Start with the "Motherboard" you are using.

John

Thanks for all the responses. Re: why can't I just add a third drive, my IT person told me that the machine he ordered simply lacks the power connection needed (it's a Dell, for better or worse -- that's our house brand). So no adding a third drive, period.

So bottom line:
- This is possibly a non-issue.
- But it looks like if I store MXF source files on my apps/OS drive and render to my second drive, I may gain *some* performance advantantage. OR: I could store MXF on my second drive and render to my apps/OS drive. Any reason to do it one way or the other way?

Thanks.

Orson

If the Dell has an open IDE or SATA port on the motherboard, then getting power to the drive is no problem whatsoever, just get a "Y" power connector.

There is nothing "wrong" with doing all your work on a single drive. Personally, I wouldn't use the apps/OS drive unless it's something like a 250gig drive with only 10 gig worth of apps and OS on it, it would be a shame to waste all that space. Ideally you could partition the drive into a relatively small C: drive (maybe 20 gig) for the apps/OS and a D: drive for other stuff.