What HDD is required now

[Steve Rhoden]

Yep, any drive will work now.
Only some may have a snappier response time than others.

Steve Rhoden (Cow Leader)
Film Maker & VFX Artist.
Owner of Filmex Creative Media.
Samples of my Work and Company can be seen here:
https://www.facebook.com/FilmexCreativeMedia

[John Rofrano]

[Paul Gregory] “When I first started looking at video editing one thing was always of major consideration & that was that your HDD was at least 7200 RPM. I suspsect that this as because we used firewire & data transfer had to be done in real time.”

Yes, doing real-time capture via firewire made it critical that the drive could keep up with the required throughput.

[Paul Gregory] “Can I now just safetly assume that almost any drive will work now?”

Yes, any drive will work but the faster the drive, the more video streams you can process. So if you are only editing a single video stream, you should be OK with slower 5400 RPM drives, but if you are doing multi-camera HD editing, you still want 7200 RPM drives. The faster drives give a better editing experience.

[Paul Gregory] “Since USB3 is so much faster than USB2 there should not even be a problem if you used a small portable drive like the WD Passport drives?”

I edit on WD Passport USB 3.0 drives all the time. I have a bunch of them and have no issues at all. I think some of those are actually 7200 RPM drives. I know I get significantly better throughput on my WD Passport drive than my internal 5400 RPM laptop drive so on my laptop I always edit on external USB 3.0 WD Passport drives. I usually pick up a couple of 1TB ones for $59 on NewEgg when they go on sale.

~jr

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