-
Recommended Hard Drives and Setup
I am currently in the process of upgrading my PC with more RAM and hard drives. I figured I would upgrade my RAM to 1.5GB from 512MB (or maybe 2.5GB if I can swing it) and add at least 2 more drives solely for video editing. I have an onboard SATA RAID controller so should I buy 2 drives and stripe them together with RAID 0 and store all my video files on it? Or would I be better off without RAID and use one drive for source files and the other for rendered files? What type of hard drives would you recommend – Maxtor, WD, Seagate, Hitachi? 8MB cache or 16MB or does it really matter? My PC is almost 3 years old, will any SATA drive work with my onboard controller?
Thanks. This forum looks great.
Al Dugan
In-Depth Media -
1 Reply
-
If you are only using DV footage I would stick with two seperate drives and wipe them every so often. SATA is pretty old, but you will have to crack your case or look up the MOBO info, there are SATA PCI cards out there. I would stick with ATA if you don’t have SATA, they are fast enough for most stuff. Keep captures on one and exports (for DVD and the DVD projects) on the other. Fragmentation is what can really slow things down.
HDs – more cache is usually better. I avoid Maxtor but others like it (I have seen a high failure rate), like WD, Fujitsu and Hitachi. Seagate is ok, but some have complained of failures at 2-3 year point, just dying w/o warning.
Don
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up