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Hard Drive for Audio and Video production. Need advice.
Hopefully this is the right section to post this. I didn’t see a hard drive section or hardware section.
For a year I’ve had constant mess with hard drive organization. i’d like to solve that but not sure exactly what the best setup should be for my workflow. Here is the programs I use for my business which requires both Video, Photo and Audio editing. I am using an iMac Intel Core i7 processor with 2GB of Video Ram. I have four USB 3 slots and two Thunderbolt slots which are already taken up for two display monitors. Below is the software I use and what I use each one for. Video: Premiere Pro, After Effects and Speedgrade. Footage is converted to Apple Pro Res. Photo Editing: Lightroom, Photoshop and digital scanning Audio: Avid Pro Tools, Adobe Audition CC and Reason. I edit, mix and produce music tracks and also edit audio for podcasts. Out of all those software programs I use and what I do with each one should I do this for my hard drive management? Have one External Hard Drive that holds every media file such as video, audio and photos Get a second External Hard Drive for cache files such as Render files? (known as scratch disk in Premiere.) Get a third external drive for all exports of completed media files. get a fourth external hard drive large enough to backup drives 1 through 3. I once read an article that said I should be using one external hard drive per software program. That sounds like overkill to me. Why would I need external hard drives for every program I use? Can someone please give me advice as to whether I’m in the right ballpark for finally getting my hard drives organized?
Bryce
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8 Replies
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Ehh… maybe I’m a lone wolf, but I would personally never organize drives that way, in fact it’s pretty much the opposite of the way I would do it. But then again, if it works for you, it works for you.
Firstly, even in this day and age of big and fast drives no one is going to get the best video performance from a single video drive… all of our suites have 6TB RAIDSs for video (six 1TB drives in a RAID). If you are doing something data/render heavy like multiple HD or 4K streams, effects, layers, filters, etc., your performance is going to be infinitely better with a RAID.
I think all of our computers are set up pretty much the same way… there’s a “C” drive, and a “V” (video) drive (which is actually not a single drive but the RAID). All programs live on the “C” drive, and all projects are done in their entirety on the “V” drive.
What you are doing which would drive me crazy is spreading a single project out on multiple drives. Here, everything is together… The project is on the same drive along with the master, all the assets, footage, graphics, sound tracks, scratch disks, rendered files… everything. In fact, they are not only in the same drive, but in the same folder.
If I need to archive something it’s a snap… and if I need to reload something that has been archived from a month or week or year ago it is easy, just one folder to track down on one external storage drive.
In your case you are going to have lots of different pieces scattered lots of different places on various drives. Personally, I’d go nuts keeping track of everything, archiving would mean finding all the bits and pieces to save, and re-assembling a project would also require the same. I think you’d be better off keeping everything together… unless you are a lot more organized than I am.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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I’m confused how you think I’m spreading the same project on multiple drives.
Here is how I have it set up with Each hard drive
HDD 1: External USB3 for All media including Photos, Video, Audio Project files
HDD 2: External USB3 for completed exported files. All Master copies of my completed film go to that drive.
SSD: For Cache and render files
HDD 3: USB 3 backup drive
I also have two other cloud storage backups.
Bryce
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[Bryce Moose] “I’m confused how you think I’m spreading the same project on multiple drives.”
Because you are.
You have, by your list above, a single project with assets such as photos, videos, etc., on one drive… exported files and masters on another… and renders on yet another. If that works for you, fine, but my question is “Why?”… I can’t think of any reason to spread project pieces over three different drives. To me it just increases the opportunity for some little orphan piece to get lost, makes archival/backup three times more complicated, and makes retrieving an old archived project three times more complicated.
When we archive a project to clear it off a RAID we just drag one single root folder to an external archive drive. To re-visit an old project, we just do the reverse… and every single element that ever went into a project (all assets, masters, renders, everything) is there back exactly as it was, in one mouse swipe.
But hey, that’s just me.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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Well that’s strange. Adobe’s own support site says to actually have a separate drive for cache and render files. Several Proffesional editors swear that having a different drive for exports and another for cache helps speed up the system.
Bryce
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found a support article on adobe’s site. Someone suggested this.
C: SSD for OS & programs.
D: HDD for media and projects (because of the size of the media and frequent changes in projects).
E: SSD for static page-file and exports.
F: SSD for media cache and previews, although a HDD may give you better life expectancy but also slower performance.Sounds almost like my setup
Bryce
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Alrighty… as I said, whatever works for ya.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Bryce Moose] “found a support article on adobe’s site. Someone suggested this. “
That “someone” is thinking too hard about a setup that is not an issue. You should have your device’s internal SSD for the OS and software, and then the fastest RAID 0 (if you have a good backup system) or RAID 5 setup you can afford. That’s it.
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I can’t afford Raid anything. I hardly have enough money as it is. I was reading in that article that you shouldn’t read and write to the same drive so that is why you need a drive for exports and another one for renders and media.
Bryce
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