Hard drive advice

[David Norman]

run a render and see what pegs at 100%

if you hard disk activity is the max that your hard drive benchmarks to then your hard drives are the bottleneck….

but if you have 4+ GB of ram then most likely your edits are all loaded into ram anyways.

I would bet that your CPU is the bottleneck for performance…

SSDs are great and will improve transfer speeds and programs so it is well worth it.

My advice is to get the largest SSD you can afford.

I use 2x240gb Intel SSDs in RAID 0

Sony Vegas Movie Studio
Intel i7 3770, 32gb, 2xRAID0 Intel 240gb SSD, 2x2TB WD Green, 3×23″ Samsung LCDs
http://www.SelmaBearsSoccer.com

[Steve Rhoden]

Increasing your processing power is the only way
you are gonna see any significant increase in render times,
not by having three configured hard drives.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia
1-876-832-4956

[John Rofrano]

I agree with David. Adding another hard drive for renders will not affect anything because renders are rarely I/O bound. Having an SDD for a boot drive is nice but 256GB is the minimum I would use.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Angelo Mike]

I only use 1 TB hard drives because I shoot a lot. I buy them refurbished, so they’re a little cheap, and use them in external enclosures, one with a sata cable, the other with USB 3.0 for backing everything up.

[Joe Tavola]

thanks for the reply, how would i go about in finding that out through task manager? under performance tab? my specs are

Intel Quad Core Q6600
8 GB RAM
Windows 8 64 bit
ATI Radeon 4870 1GB GPU

outdated I know.. going to do a new build soon enough.

[Joe Tavola]

thanks John for clearing that up

[Joe Tavola]

thanks Steve

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “Adding another hard drive for renders will not affect anything because renders are rarely I/O bound.”

Which is true, until it’s not. You can run into I/O bound renders if you’re using lots of video layers and lots of stills… particularly if you’re using higher bitrate video (DNxHD or Cineform, DSLR video or other ~50Mb/s forms, or even the more recent AVC-Intra or RAW DSLR formats) and/or lots of very large image/photo files.

I have run into this. Then again, I’ve done animations with 60 layers. There are two main issues. Once is simply bandwidth: if the aggregate bitrates of your video files add up to more than the speed of your HDD, the HDD is your main and perhaps only bottleneck.

The other is seeking… the fact that your main HDD’s peak speed is for a linear track, like a single video file. Put dozens of assets into a project, and you’ll reduce this. Write the output to that same HDD, and it’s reduced even more… so having SOMEWHERE ELSE to put the output file, even just that one thing, may boost your performance. But as John said, this IS a rare thing… most folks working primarily with video from a 2-3 camera shoot won’t exceed the capacity of a single HDD.

And it’s easy to tell… fire up your favorite CPU monitor. If you’re running sans GPU, you really ought to see the CPU in the 90%+ performance range… I typically see 95-98% on a simple project. If you are using the GPU to help out, you may see that drop to 75%-80%. The first time I discovered I was I/O bound, I was seeing more like 20% CPU use… part of the reason my 2 minute video was taking 5+ hours to render 🙂

-Dave

[Norman Black]

I agree with everyone here. The HD is the least of your worries.

Remember that video streams are 10s of mega bits per second and hard disks can easily handle 10s-100 of mega bytes per second (depending on seeks). Bits to bytes is an 8x difference already. So multiple simultaneous video streams are easily handled.

Also we typically don’t render in even real time so the effective video stream bitrate is much lower making the I/O demands lower.

[Joe Tavola]

Sorry so John even if using 1 drive for everything (media and renders) doesnt make a difference? Or you should definitely have 2 drives minimum (media/OS/programs) and renders on second? Any speed noticeable with 2 drives as opposed to one doing it all? 2 TBs rather then small ssd and 1 TB make more sense?