2 Hard Drives
Moderator: Ken Berry
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jchris9999
2 Hard Drives
I'm curious how to set up for encoding. Everywhere I read says to read from one drive and write to another. If I have 1 drive that is faster than a second, what drive should I read from and what drive should I write to. Is it better to have the VS program on the faster drive?
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rwindeyer
As long as both your drives are of "adequate" speed it probably doesn't matter.
As a general statement: it will work quite well with everything on one drive; I did it this way for some time. The purists would say (correctly) that it is better to have one drive reading system and program information (the OS and VS program) and writing stored video on another drive.
Since getting an external hard drive I find it is really convenient having all that extra space to store video; I haven't noticed a quantum leap in performance.
As a general statement: it will work quite well with everything on one drive; I did it this way for some time. The purists would say (correctly) that it is better to have one drive reading system and program information (the OS and VS program) and writing stored video on another drive.
Since getting an external hard drive I find it is really convenient having all that extra space to store video; I haven't noticed a quantum leap in performance.
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PeterMilliken
- Posts: 264
- Joined: Sun Dec 12, 2004 9:03 pm
- Location: Sydney, Australia
There are other factors involved and no easy answer. If you place the less frequently access files on the slower drive i.e. your VS8 (program) files (since there are basically only read once at program start or at least very seldom) and your video files on the 2nd, faster drive then you would expect that the system overall would be somewhat faster.
However, this would only be true if your "system" was what they call IO (input/output) bound i.e. the single factor slowing down or bottlenecking your system was the rate at which data is tranfered to and from hard drives. But in the case of video editing, the "system" is actually (as a general rule
) CPU bound i.e. the constraining element that slows everything down is the amount of data processing that the CPU has to do.
So as a general rule, over the entire lifecycle of creating a video, I would suggest that being concerned about this aspect (which drive and how many) is probably not worth the effort since the generally throttling effect is the CPU speed and memory access etc etc
Having a second drive is more a matter of convenience AFAIK. I also use an external drive - but this is more so I can move my video editing project between two computers, a desktop and a laptop. Having a second drive (especially for capture) also helps in situations when you are running low on disk space, your disk is fragmented, other applications running etc etc. Also I find it more "organised" to have all my video editing stuff on a second drive and the rest of the gumpf (family files, kids games etc etc) on the primary drive. By keeping the video files in a separate partition (whether on a separate physical drive or not) also allows me to constrain the amount of information that I have to save when I complete my current project and want to archive all the material for possible later (re)use.
In summary, if you have plenty of space on your current drive and are happy with your performance, I wouldn't necessarily purchase a second drive expecting to see any performance boost
Hope this helps,
Peter
However, this would only be true if your "system" was what they call IO (input/output) bound i.e. the single factor slowing down or bottlenecking your system was the rate at which data is tranfered to and from hard drives. But in the case of video editing, the "system" is actually (as a general rule
) CPU bound i.e. the constraining element that slows everything down is the amount of data processing that the CPU has to do.So as a general rule, over the entire lifecycle of creating a video, I would suggest that being concerned about this aspect (which drive and how many) is probably not worth the effort since the generally throttling effect is the CPU speed and memory access etc etc
Having a second drive is more a matter of convenience AFAIK. I also use an external drive - but this is more so I can move my video editing project between two computers, a desktop and a laptop. Having a second drive (especially for capture) also helps in situations when you are running low on disk space, your disk is fragmented, other applications running etc etc. Also I find it more "organised" to have all my video editing stuff on a second drive and the rest of the gumpf (family files, kids games etc etc) on the primary drive. By keeping the video files in a separate partition (whether on a separate physical drive or not) also allows me to constrain the amount of information that I have to save when I complete my current project and want to archive all the material for possible later (re)use.
In summary, if you have plenty of space on your current drive and are happy with your performance, I wouldn't necessarily purchase a second drive expecting to see any performance boost
Hope this helps,
Peter