Best HDD situation for HD video editing (HDV)

[zeek987]

Hey everyone,
I am building a system, and I am wondering what the best set up for HDDs is for editing HD (HDV) video?
System is a Q6600 with a gigabyte DS3.

I like the reviews for this drive: SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

I am just thinking to get only 1 Samsung Spinpoint 500 gb drive for the video and materials, and reuse an old 80gig HDD for the OS and programs. Will this be an efficient enough setup for editing this type of video?
I will use some external 300gb HDDs for backups and long term storage.

I have no experience with RAID of any kind, but I do realize it would provide a boost in performance and even backups, BUT would it really be worth the hassle and extra cost?


Basically, I need reliable, fairly quick, good through put, large, and reasonably priced HDDs.
What model drives would you recommend and what type of setup would be ok or the best?

Thanks!

 

[enlightenment]

Editing HD-video surely consumes a lot of storage, but depending on the codecs and processor capacity, it might or might not prove a bottleneck on your harddrive. Often, this stuff is very CPU intensive and even an older disk is able to keep up. However you might get performance benefits of using a seperate 'output' and 'input/scratch' disk, if you're doing things like transcoding.

Editing video mainly uses Sequential access as far as i know, which means the Samsung T166 or the new Samsung F1 disks would be suitable. RAID0 could provide a huge benefit in this area, if your CPU/memory is able to process fast enough for the storage to become a bottleneck.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

If the editing codec is HDV, then virtually any hard drive can keep up without any problem. HDV is the same data rate as DV (25 Mb/sec). Most editing software needs sufficient bandwidth for 3 streams (2 reading, the CPU performing a transition, and 1 writing) for a total of 75 Mb/sec, or about 10 MB/sec.

This is well within the sequential transfer rates of any modern drive.

Now, if the codec is a different HD codec than HDV (something like DVCPro-HD, Sony HDCAM, Avid DNxHD), we're into a way different realm.

 

[enlightenment]

Assuming he uses realtime encoding. But transcoding goes at the fastest speed, so that can be like 20 times the normal playing speed too, until either the CPU/Memory subsystem or the storage is bottlenecked.

The question is then: what goes first on a modern system? I think it highly depends on the processing power the codec needs. Some codecs provide very high quality encoding but subsequently require enourmous CPU processing power. These codecs probably will not be bottlenecked by storage, even on a quadcore. But that is just a guess.