Best Practices / Configuration of Hard drives for smooth sailing w PP

[Tod Hopkins]

I have always kept my project and media on the same drives. Projects and media are not accessed at the same time so it’s not really a performance issue. Always set auto-save location to different drive from the project or you have no redunancy.

Multiple drives are better for media, allowing for parallel access and spreading the burden, but really it’s about money. WD portable drives are the lowest rung on the pole. Slow and unreliable. Speeds maxing at about 120MBps, barely enough to do simple 1080p jobs. You can step up to RAID 0 drives that contain two physical drives in one enclosure. OWC Extreme and G-Tech G-Raids are examples of these. They get you to 200MBps+ (and they will publish this throughput spec). They also use better physical drives inside. More expensive. Next step up is full RAID 5 drives, putting 4 or more physical drives into one enclosure. This puts you in the $600+ range for 4TB. This provides even more speed as well as some data redundancy. They will get you to 350MBps+ with spinning drives depending on how many physical drives and their quality. With SSDs inside you’ll scream! The quality of the drives inside matters a bit less because even cheap drives in RAID 5 are faster and safer, but the better the drives inside, the faster and more reliable.

Best price/performance comes from SSDs, which are way down in price, but still not as cheap at large scale. 1TB SSDs at about $100 dollars are very price competitive and at 400MBs+ each, faster than most options. The downside is capacity. It’s harder to connect 4, 1TB SSDs than one 4TB RAID enclosure, but it is cheaper.

Cheers,

tod

[Jonathan Ramsey]

Hi. Ideally you would have a drive array in RAID 5. That way if a drive fails, you put a new one in and it rebuilds everything. Otherwise, your backup system is an option, of course, which is similar to a RAID 0 array. Those are faster but riskier. RAID 5 is worth the speed loss in most cases. There is a lot to a RAID array and you want hardware not software striping. Of course, use the fastest port you have (thunderbolt, etc.). As for budget, I prefer the CalDigit drives but even more affordable are the G Technology Drives. I haven’t used those but I know some long form doc editors do and are reasonably happy with them. People will debate where you put your project and cache files. For starters, just follow Adobe’s recommendations and go with that for the time being. Put the cache files on a diff drive than the media. The project file can go anywhere… it’s really small. But back it up with regularity as they are notorious for going corrupt with large projects. Good luck!

[Todd Perchert]

And not to be a downer on the RAID-5 parade here. RAID-5 is good. It’s better than RAID-0 if you want some safety net. But I will tell you, I’ve had a RAID-5 drive die, and during the rebuild, a second drive died. This has been on more than one occasion with good, quality arrays. RAID-6 is better if you can swing it. Just happened recently with a Buffalo array… which is why it’s good to ALWAYS have a back up plan. I know, easier said than done.

Since you are editing on portable, a smaller RAID-0 G-RAID will give you enough speed to do what you need. Just make sure to have it backed up. Because it will be easy to lose that footage in a drive failure.

Like Tod had said, I also keep my projects and media all together in one location. I usually have several projects going at once, so that keeps everything tidy. Ideally, you would want you cache to go to a separate fast drive from your media. Since you’re editing on a MacBook, I’m not sure you have the drives to do that. :/