FW800 7200RPM or Internal Hard Disk 7200RPM?

[Jeff Mueller]

Along these lines:

I just bought my first Mac Pro (admittedly a 1st Gen Quad Core) to replace my iMac. (Yeah, I know). I’ve been using a G-Raid over FW as my scratch disc and the internal as my system drive. The Tower is coming with two 500GB drives (presumably the original 7200 rpm 8 MB cache type), money is limited of course (otherwise it would be a 12 core), but should I put a super fast system drive in the Pro and stick with the G-Raid over FW for scratch? Or add a single big HD internally for scratch? Or put in a PCIe eSata card and connect the G-Raid through that? (G-Tech’s card is $200 but I see them for $50 or less).

Thanks.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Michael Gissing]

Few people edit in isolation. The big advantage of having an external drive is the ease of moving to a suite for grading, online & sound post.

As for speed a second internal would be faster than a FW800 external, but an esata external would be the same speed for a single 7200 drive.

[Jeff Mueller]

Thanks Michael.

Would I miss the Raid 0 at all if I went internal? At present i don’t collaborate much (I DO play well with others, it’s just a geo thing!) and I assume I could offload a project file and media to an external if necessary, so it’s more about how do I get the best (fastest and most stable) performance out of this system (which is light years ahead of what I had but amateurish to the experts here).

On the iMac I have felt that the FW connection was a bottleneck, but there have been so many bottlenecks that I am not sure of its relevance. FWIW I typically shoot HDV either 60i or 24p, and on the iMac have been editing in HDV but rendering to ProRes 4:2:2 standard. I’ve tried editing in ProRes (both by using the built in conversion with FCP and by converting later) but between the space requirements and throughput over the FW connection it seems to me to present more problems than editing HDV native and rendering to ProRes. Most of my final product is either 720p H.264 or DVD MPEG2. Biggest PITA with going straight from HDV to ProRes is 1440×1080 1.33 pixels seem to confuse everything downstream. Do others agree?

Thanks so much.

Jeff Mueller
http://www.ApertureVideos.com
Santa Barbara, CA

[Mark Laslo]

Shane And Nace,

Thanks for the advice. I work with a lot of still photos in my project and am currently trying to reorganize my media files. Does it really make much of a difference if my pictures are on my system drive as long as the video is on a separate drive? It would make backing up with timecapsule easier since I would set it to back up my system drive and not my media drive and find another system to back up media.

Thanks,
Mark