Video Editing Hard Drives

[windpath]

I have 300 hrs of HDV to work through. Wondering if a 4TB External Drive with RAID 0-5 capability will do the trick?

 

[sminlal]

For video editing you typically need the fastest possible transfer rates. That normally means RAID 0. But watch out for external drives - the connection to the host may be a bottleneck. You'd probably be better off mounting the drives internally and connecting them directly to the motherboard host ports (assuming you have a RAID-capable motherboard).

 

[FireWire2]

Get eBOX-R5 - Five tray-less hardware raid

Set up as raid5 with 4x drives and the 5th drive use is as hot swap archive data

It will give your over 200MB/sec for video editing and backup solution

This is what it can support

 

[scotu]

If you have a RAID capable motherboard and 4 free SATA ports, it might be better to just go 4 x 1TB in RAID 0, and that'll probably cost you less.

 

[gnice3d]

I have 300 hrs of HDV to work through. Wondering if a 4TB External Drive with RAID 0-5 capability will do the trick?

External storage is not a good solution for editing video unless you have fiber connectivity which is big bucks... You'll want an internal config with a hardware based raid controller running one or two striped (0) array(s). Soft raid which is commonly found on premium boards will tax your CPU slightly... better than a single drive solution but not the best.

A pcie or pci-x card will offer the highest amount of throughput. You will also see a performance bump if your scratch (source) and destination are separate arrays.

In order for us to offer the best solution, you need to actually provide details/specs on the computer... and if you're just asking what capacity drive(s) you need, you have to provide the codecs you will be reading from/writing to.


I'd also suggest using a linux distro as your OS which will avoid the overhead of winblows or somewhat limited raid options of a Mac.

 

[scotu]

Something like Windows 7 offers very little "overhead" more than a minimalistic linux distribution (say, something like Arch Linux) configured to be a modern desktop machine. I can't speak for OS X out of experience, but considering that in general, it's pretty close to windows, I'd say they're similar enough that it doesn't make too much difference. Furthermore, Windows and OS X both provide unique software solutions for video editing that Linux doesn't, often making linux a completely invalid choice for video editing.