Re: Best Hard Drive for Video
- From: "Smarty" <nobody@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 10 Sep 2006 00:25:09 -0400
Rick,
I don't think your problem is unique or especially complex. Adding hard
drives for video is not unlike adding them for any other purpose, except
that you may be a bit more careful about transfer speeds if you intend to
capture high def content. Most standard definition video requires disk
transfer rates which are well within the performance range of most cheap
7200 RPM drives, and Raptors are not needed. Bus saturation can become a
problem if you are trying to do multiple video captures or transfers
simultaneously, and therefore Firewire (and especially USB 2) are
problematic if using more than one external drive for video capture.
However, PATA/EIDE, SATA, and SCSI all do very well with supporting 2 or
maybe 3 drives running at high I/O rates simultaneously, a situation few
people need or use. RAID offers some reliability advantages and can also
boost speed, if you have mission-critical content to deal with.
If your growth needs become more concrete, it would be easier to offer you a
specific plan. It is tempting to say "Add another EIDE" drive since it does
not require, in your case, another controller, and will certainly have more
than adequate speed if you buy a 7200 RPM drive.
Adding another SATA or SCSI drive only makes sense if you intend to add
more drives and need the eventual expansion of another controller card.
Since you can buy very large (500 MB) drives cheaply, it is hard to imagine
needing to add several, but you may have very large volume production to
handle, and have not stated this yet. As you are probably aware, MPEG2 video
such as found on most DVDs requires about 2 or 3 GB/hour and lightly
compressed DV video (avi format) or high def HDV requires about 13 GB/hour,
so you could store tons of video on a single 500 GB drive. Uncompressed high
def video is another story, which I suspect is not your area of interest
based on your question.
I would not recommend using a video server and moving video back and forth
to your workstation for editing, rendering, etc. The network imparts too
much of a speed penalty to make this a fast solution, although there are
situations where a client/server arrangement makes a lot of sense for video.
My home SageTV system serves a half dozen PC "clients" around the house with
a PC video server which records and stores MPEG2 video, and this type of
situation makes sense because there is no editing or interactive transfers
other than pure streaming of video from server to clients.
Rendering is, however, a special case worth mentioning. The slowest part of
video authoring and editing with Vegas and most other programs is the
rendering step, and Vegas specifically offers a method to spread the
rendering over more than one machine. This process is worthy of another
thread if you want to investigate it further, but it does offer a
significant speed up for some production workflows. This may or may not
matter in your particular case.....
Hope this helps and provides some answers to your questions.
Smarty
<RickWarda@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1157858290.047152.322020@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I keep getting told this is a good question but no one can advise me to
a good answer.
I have a video editing PC workstation with one Raptor C-drive and two
300GB Western Digital SATA hardrives for source video projects.
This PC is also connected to my server which simply stores graphics,
music and serves printers and stuff.
Here is my question.
I need to add more video hard drive space (I know, I know I just can't
delete the projects I have on there right now, and don't want to
re-capture that video)
So should I
1.) Add another SATA drive ( I would have to buy a PCI-SATA card, my
mobo only has 2 ports)
2.) Add another EIDE drive ( I think I have one EIDE spot left for
this)
3.) Add an external USB 2.0 drive
4.) Add an external Firewire drive
5.) Add a dedicated video drive to my Server (which is connected via a
Lyksis wired hub)
6.) Add an SCSI card and start a daisy chain of drives (too $ ?)
Basically I'm wondering If I will see performance issues between these
different scenarios.
I will be capturing video to this new drive, creating Vegas projects
that incorporate this video
and then render the project.
Will there be different performance issues in the Capture, Editing or
Rendering tasks?
I'm assuming this may continue to grow.
PLEASE ADVISE,
Rick
.
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