Not so sure on that. Typically your hard drive is going to contain lots of GB worth in footage. In fact, you should be dealing with terabytes when it comes to the size of your hard drive.
You should also have several of these hard drives connected using RAID0 (stripped) at the minimum. This allows the data to be spread across the drives and recalled faster when editing/rendering.
I have not dealt with master files, as I usually edit with what is on the drive, render my final version, then move on to the next project, removing the former files from the edit drives completely.
Sorry I am not much help beyond that.
Cy