Video editing system. HDD question

Personally I have c: for windows and applications, d: and h: for video and audio, and j: for render files, all on separate drives; I also have other partitions and disks in there, but not for video editing. Avid splits the audio and video into separate files so it makes sense to put them on different disks... I alternate between d: and h: for video when capturing to disk. Other applications store video and audio in the same file, so they read both simultaneously.

I wouldn't worry about RAID unless you're editing uncompressed HD, when you'll need as much throughput as you can get. A standard hard drive is plenty fast enough for DV or HDV editing and the primary limit is seek time, not throughput; RAID won't help with seek time, but putting files on two different disks generally will.

As for memory, I'm using single-channel PC2700 for 1080i HD editing, so I doubt you'll have any problems with what you're getting .

Edit: oh, yeah, when I've been editing DV movies for other people they've typically brought me a Firewire Lacie drive so I could capture to it and output the finished movie to it as a DV file, then they take the disk away with all the files when I'm done. Works fine at the 3.5 megabytes per second that DV requires, but would be hard-pressed for uncompressed SD or low-compression HD.

Thank you for the reply! Maybe I'll go with some WD Raptors instead.

But I would like to know a few things:

- On a system disc, which is more important: Access time or throughput? or both?

- On the editing disc, which is more important: Access time or throughput? or both?

- On the output disc, which is more important: Access time or throughput? or both?

Also, if I do RAID 0 and make a few partitions, will it be as fast as several physical discs? Or even close to it?

Access time really, as it's regularly accessing multiple files all over the disk. Being able to read a 4kb file at 10 MB per second or 1000 MB per second really doesn't make much difference .

Throughput until you have enough to easily deal with your video files (and any current disk will have enough for DV or HDV), then access time.

Throughput, so you can write data out to it as fast as possible.

Welcome to the forum and congrats in advance on your new toy-slash-workhorse.

Getting the easy stuff out of the way first...

DDR3 is already putting you on the bleeding edge and by its nature the latencies are little further out there than the numbers you're accustomed to seeing with DDR2. CL9 isn't going to impact your experience noticably compared to far more expensive pieces.

Now let's have a chat about RAID 0...

RAID-0 on two drives is at least twice as likely to exhibit a failure as a single drive. Someone with more statistics experience can jump in and say how much more than twice, since I left the continuing education system that year, etc., but you can also add in the additional probability of interface failures plus an overall higher failure rate due to increased temperatures with so many drives in the box, etc. Also note that consumer hard drives have around twice the failure rate of enterprise hard drives.

Given that higher failure risk you have to consider the performance potential to be gained and intelligently choose the tradeoff. The anticipated performance benefits of RAID-0 do not apply to all usage patterns. For example, what will be the primary use of your new system and is that use highly dependent on seek times or on sustained transfer rates? Frequently you could instead choose a single more expensive hard drive in a given size and accomplish similar performance gains without the additional failure risk and with a beneficial compromise in heat, energy, reliability and so on. Or you could purchase larger hard drives with the same general performance numbers and experience less falloff in sustained transfer rates given the same amount of stored material (drive throughput falls off by around 50% at the full mark). Or get larger, higher performance drives and have the best of both worlds.

Finally, do a little research about that E-SATA external's performance if you want to use it for output. E-SATA is slower than SATA. Not sure if it's so much slower that it will be a bottleneck or not, but to have a look.

What will you be using for video editing? Adobe CS?

-B

Separate drives would perform faster. Remember that while the OS sees the partitions as separate drives, it is still only a single drive. If you are copying something from one 74GB drive to another, there are more read/write heads involved then if you copy from one 74GB partition to another on the same drive. I don't consider this a speed penalty per se, but its something to keep in mind.

Keep in mind that raptors are faster for several reasons. One of the most obvious is that they spin faster. 10K RPMs allows the disks to "come back around" faster then 7200RPMs. While I don't know for sure, I suspect that the raptors only use the outer edge of the platter. The outer edge of the 300GB drive might be as fast, but as it gets closer to the center, the speed will drop off.

So I have studied things again.

I've decided that I'm going with WD3200AAKS drives. They are cheap and I think I can get good performance out of them also.

So I'm thinking of making a 70GB or so partition to one disc. And leaving the rest of the space unformatted. And use that as a system disc.
Basically I get Raptor performance, or something near with half the price. Right?