Best External Hardrive to use for rendering

[Tevya Washburn]

I’ve heard those Lacie bigdisks have heat issues. The raided drives produce too much heat for not having a fan in the case. So I’d be carefull there. Look at some reviews of them on Newegg. As for fastest/best. The very best way to go would probably be a raided one like you’re talking about, but with an SATA II connection to your machine. Next best would be SATA I and/or Firewire 800, last USB 2 &/or Firewire 400. But raided (stripe) sets will always be faster at reading and storing the data than non-raided, or mirror only.

–the Fiddler

[Allen Zagel]

Personally I’ve not had too good of luck rendering to an external HD. I have 2 here and wound up using them as video storage. I always render to an internal HD and keep that one ‘clean’ by putting the unused files on the external one.

Allen

ASX Media Productions
https://www.asxvideo.com

[Debbi Mita]

We chose Caldigit’s S2VR duo.
https://www.caldigit.com/S2VRDuo.asp
Since it is a SATA RAID, you can free up the firewire port to capture device.
they also bundle 4-Port SATA card which makes whole solution very inexpensive.

S2VR Duo can reach 150MB+ per second, twice faster than any other firewire RAID,it it also provides hardware RAID 1 option or JBOD. excellent RAID disk. if you choose firwire interface, they also have FireWire version 2-bay RAID, FireWireVR.
https://www.caldigit.com/FireWireVR.asp

Both S2VR Duo and FireWireVR have removalbe drives design, so you could purchase extra drive pairs for offline storage.

If you are looking for the Best External Hardrive to use for rendering, CalDigit is your best bet.
many editors are posting their reviews and feedbacks online:
https://www.caldigit.com/Testimonials.asp
https://www.caldigit.com/Reviews.asp

hope this helps.

[Ron Shook]

#88,

[vegasuser88] “Could someone tell me what the best option is for an external hard drive? I am looking for performance rather than security or backup. Something that will decrease my render times?”

I don’t understand the answers that you have received here. A high performance hard drive isn’t going to make any appreciable difference in your rendering times because rendering stresses the CPU(s) not the hard drive(s). Any hard drive, internal or external, will keep up with the rendering. If you want to spend money to decrease your rendering times, get faster CPU(s) and a mobo to go with them if necessary. High speed hard drive arrays are valuable and necessary for multi-stream uncompressed playback and such, but won’t benefit rendering hardly at all.

Am I missing something here?

Ron Shook

[Mat @ lacie]

The LaCie d2 500GB, Big Disk 1TB and all Bigger Disks have variable speed fan that kicks in when needed.

Mat @ LaCie