How best to utilise my 2 disks?

Banji Abereoje · Post by **Banji Abereoje** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 2:38 pm

Hi all,

I have two physical hard drives (say, C: 120gb & D: 100gb ) in my PC, pls advice me on how to optimize this for video editing.

Which do I set up as working folder and the one to specify as additional folder for preview; as asked to under File > Preferences > General / Preview?

Thanks in advance

Banji A.

etech6355 · Post by **etech6355** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 3:01 pm

Use the 2nd physical hard disk for your large video/audio files, capturing/exporting etc.

On many new systems with fast SATA drives & Core2 processors this isn't as critical as it use to be. Depends on how large the video/audio files are.
The newer computers are fast, 2 or more drives on a new computer only means even faster.

You can also use an External USB/Firewire drive but do not assign any temporary directories, preview directories to a removable drive.

Post by **Ron P.** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 3:03 pm

I have 2 internal physical hard drives, and 1 external. I have my second internal HDD partitioned into 3 virtual drives. 2 of those drives are used for my video editing. I will setup the working folder for VS on one of these drives.

For the other I will use both the default and the other Working "virtual" drive from my second hard drive for the General Preview.

For my setup however it does not matter much which of the virtual drives I use, and if I set it up so that the Preview is set to it. The reason is that the second hard drive will be used to write to, while my "root drive" (C: ) does the reading. So no matter which virtual drive I use to write to, both are still on the same physical drive, so it is handling all the writing.

DVDDoug · Post by **DVDDoug** » Tue Mar 18, 2008 7:42 pm

I think you'll get the best performance by using one drive for your original files and another drive for the destination... Read from one drive and write to another. That way, the read/write head doesn't have to seek back-and-forth between the read-file and the write-file.

I haven't done that. For "organizational' reasons, I keep all of my audio/video files on a separate disk. That way, I can easily clean-up the disk before I start a new project (without accidentally deleting any important files). I suppose I could partition my disks in a way that would give me the best of both worlds, but I haven't done that.

If you are rendering (encoding), the CPU is usually the bottleneck, and disk performance won't make any difference at all. ...And, when I think about the amount of time that goes into a "typical" video project, faster drives won't make much difference.