Is it Best to Use 1 Hard Drive or 2 Hard Drives with PP and AE?

[Vincent Becquiot]

John,

It is actually best to have 3. One for the OS, one for your captured media, and one for your rendering/cache; but definitely a minimum of 2.

Vince

Vince Beck
Santa Rosa, CA

[Ulflaursen]

Will the third drive increase speed?

If I have a systemdrive, WD Raptor 10k drive, and 320 GB (raid 0 on two 160 GB disks) and a single drive as third, what should go on the raid set and what on the third drive?

/Ulf

Rgds.
/Ulf – Denmark

[Vincent Becquiot]

The point here is to separate anything Premiere will want to pull at the same time, keeping a single drive having to go back and forth looking for stuff.

How much speed you will gain from a third drive is of course depending on the overhaul system, and whether it can keep up with the data coming through.

Vince

Vince Beck
Santa Rosa, CA

[Vincent Becquiot]

Regarding what should go where. I’ ll be honest here, I can’t confirm this, but I can safely assume that the OS should use the fastest drive. Of course anything to do with video will want to have the largest drive so that the system doesn’t have to start splitting things up too much once you start running low in space.

My two bit 😉

Vince

Vince Beck
Santa Rosa, CA

[Blast1]

[Vincent Becquiot] “but I can safely assume that the OS should use the fastest drive”

Alot of people waste money on very fast large drives for the OS/Apps, but once booted and program is loaded there is very little use for the OS drive except housekeeping, usually a good use for a newer PATA drive thats laying around or been in use in a system thats being upgraded, use a single or raid SATA II for capture and video source files, another SATA drive for scratch disks, previews, audio, finished clips

[Vincent Becquiot]

All I can tell you is that back when I added that third drive and imaged copy my OS to the newest/fastest drive, I shaved an average of 20% of most of my renders, and lost some of the freezes I was getting while editing a timeline that was fully rendered. And if you happen to work with 1080i footage, you will agree that any little system improvement will make a huge difference. BTW, This was without a fresh install, and no other added components.

Vince

Vince Beck
Santa Rosa, CA

[Ulflaursen]

Thanks Blast1 and Vincent.

I have a lot to go for now – need to go shopping 🙂

/Ulf

Rgds.
/Ulf – Denmark

[Blast1]

[Vincent Becquiot] “I shaved an average of 20% of most of my renders, and lost some of the freezes I was getting while editing a timeline that was fully rendered”
Premiere sets up stuff on the system drive that can affect your overall system performance if you don’t move them off to another drive, one indication is random hangups because of fighting with housekeeping tasks.

[Vince Becquiot]

Yes, and that reminds me, someone told me once that it is better to actually install the Premiere files, which usually go in “Program files” on another drive than the operating system’s . Not sure if there is any truth to that, but it might be worth giving it a shot.

Vince

[John Kompa]

Vincent Becquiot Yes, and that reminds me, someone told me once that it is better to actually install the Premiere files, which usually go in “Program files” on another drive than the operating system’s . Not sure if there is any truth to that, but it might be worth giving it a shot.

Hmm. That’s interesting comment. I’d like to hear from others if they agree. I’m going to purchase a couple of drives SOON…

Thanks!
John K