hard drives for video editing

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Guest

Guest
Hi all. I do video editing at home, and currently have no problems with my current hard drive (WD 40GB). I am planning on upgrading to the new WD 120GB, but was wondering if the WD 100GB w/8MB cache would make a difference in either the capture or processing of the video editing I do?
 
G

Guest

Guest
I dont think that the cache will make too much difference, anyway what little speed it will offer will be offset against the 20GB less storage space.
But forget the 8MB cache for the moment:
Have you thought of RAID?
A RAID array will give you a much bigger performance gain than an 8MB cache. I know from personal experience because I do a lot of video editing myself. Believe me, once you switch to RAID you will wonder why you didnt do it sooner. Why not buy two 60GB drives and an EIDE RAID controller card and set them up as a striped array? Or even use soft-RAID if your OS permits. It would be much better value for money than a large single drive. Also, RAID is much better for capturing.
 

Oni

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Dec 31, 2007
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I agree for the most part, but it depends what type of video capture you have. If your capturing through firewire an ATA-33 hard drive is fast enough to capture without loosing frames. But if your capturing from almost anything else I would have to suggest raid-0.
I have a raid-0 array for video capture and games and it gives a huge performance boost, even while editing video in premiere its faster over a single hard drive. The only bad thing is your drive can suddenly get a bad stripe and then your entire array is lost and you have to build it again which is what happened to me recently. I lost tons of footage I had captured and ALL of my games and saved games. Now to remedy the problem I got a 60 gig 5400 rpm hard drive to back up data too (for $50 at bestbuy it was a good deal)
And what he means by software raid is that NT kernel Operating systems (I think NT4, Win2kpro, and XP pro) will take two hard drives and to software raid without a special raid controller. This method is faster than one hard drive, but a fraction slower than hardware raid. For the most part I believe that 8mb cache will help when you do things with smaller files and maybe some games, but isn't really much help with large file video manipulation and capture. I'm sure its a slight performance boost but not much.
 

AMD_Man

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Jul 3, 2001
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Yes forget the cache!!! What you want is a RAID! Get another 40GB Western Digital hard drive and RAID 0 them!

AMD technology + Intel technology = Intel/AMD Pentathlon IV; the <b>ULTIMATE</b> PC processor
 

bw37

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Sort of a hypothetical since for now I've gone with a single additional 7200rpm drive for now:

How would raid 0 performance compare between 2 x 5400rpm drives versus 2 x 7200 drives?

Since you never seem to get the full doubling of speed vs a single drive (with raid 0), I wonder if the 5400's would be just as fast as the 7200's. They're certainly cheaper! I know the seek time would be slower since the 5400's all seem slower.

BW