Which HDDs are best suited for a Vegas edit system ?

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plainman007

Well-known member
Im looking at changing my HDDs in a phased manner. I currently work with 3 x 250gb sata drives internal. Im looking at slowly upgrading t0 500gb drives x 3 or maybe 4 nos. Which drives make more sense to get smooth unstuttering playback of HD video when on the timeline.

Could anyone chime in on what you feel about buffer / cache size ? Im looking at the Seagate 'ST3500-320as' this model has 500gb with a 32mb buffer. But does buffer/cache play an important role in sequential reads such as large video files or only is its effect seen only with smaller data files ? Also the transfer rate mentioned on the seagate site says 105MB/s. Is this sustained transfer rate ? Or how do we otherwise find sustained transfer rate ?

Also does anyone feel 500gb HDDs may overheat soon in a video edit environment or does this problem only show up in sizes above 1TB ?

Thanks...
 
If you have stuttering playback, chances are high it's not the drives. Frankly, I'd buy 3-4 of the fastest transfer rate 1TB drives I could.
 
Ive not had stuttering playback. Ive had fairly decent playback with preview mode (half res) playing uncompressed SD footage. But it stutters with uncompressed HD resolutions. And i was looking at this benefit. Also i was looking at the factor that 500gb HDDs will give better performance than the current 250gb ones i have (75% occupied due to the uncompressed footage i work with) as we get better results with only upto 50% of the drive occupied. The 1 TBs would work out very expensive and ive heard that they fail more often and overheat easily. Ive heard the video editors sweetspot is upto 640Gb drives.
 
Uncompressed HD needs RAID for playback. You're going to need 4 or more spindles to keep up with that.

I hadn't anything about the overheating on the larger drives. I'll have to look at that more carefully next month when I order my new machine.
 
What type of HD material are you working with?

I edit DVCPROHD footage off over USB(!) with no stuttering. Not ideal, but it goes to show how well things have improved over the past few years. I remember needing a SCSI raid just to edit DV footage -- and that barely worked!
 
SD uncompressed, HDV Footage, and sometimes 720p/1080p Uncompressed. Im not having problems with the first 2. I even sometimes get away with HD 720p uncompressed. Its the last that stutters. Also its not a serious problem. Im just thinking of migrating to higher capacity drives to get better storage space and maybe some increase in performance.
 
105 MBps is probably an ideal number with the Seagate drive, one that you'll get towards the lower end of the data saturation spectrum. If you want to see a wide spread of HDD benchmarks, this is a good link to explore:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/3.5-hard-drive-charts/benchmarks,24.html

If you search around, you're sure to find the charts that show steady decreases in throughput with increases in data saturation (unless you're using SSD's, of course).

I guess the question you have to ask yourself is what are the throughput requirements for the video codecs you use, in megabytes per second? Take that info then look at average and minimum read speeds of potential hard drives, maybe even look at RAID 0 set-ups.

Also remember the speed of the interfaces you use. FW 400 = ~40MBps, FW 800 = ~80MBps, SATA (II) = ~ 375 MBps (though no drives are testing that limit yet).

Hope that sheds some light. PM me if I can help more.

Edit: Also, what kind of system are you working on? Are you sure the HDD's are the bottleneck and not the CPU or GPU?
 
Eximious > Your right in that the drive i bought is the Seagate ST3500320AS. Its throughput is touted at 105 Mbps and i think thats sustained. I benched marked the drive myself with HD utilities and they reported 90 Mbps as min transfer rate and 110 Mbps as max transfer rate. I will be trying this drive out for sometime before i decide to swap out my other 3 x 250gb sata drives that im currently using.
 
I am in the process of setting up my new system - I am mulling over the best way to set up the HDDs at the moment. I will definitely use RAID, but I am still trying to decide which setup. Now a lot depends on what your motherboard will support - I am setting up a new i7 system, so the motherboard will support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10, and "Matrix". Your choice may be more limited. Make sure that you have HW Raid - SW Raid uses the processor for the RAID control, and is probably going to defeat the object of video playback performance.

One of the most common recommendations I have heard is to have separate boot/application drives, and data drives. Given the fact that you have existing 250G drives, I would recommend setting a pair up in RAID1, and just keeping your windows installation and applications there. Then add a pair of 1TB's (NewEgg has Hitachi 1TB drives for ~=$90), in either Raid0 (faster) or Raid1 (safer, and still faster than a single drive), for your data.

As I am buying all new drives, I am seriously considering getting 4 of the 1TB Hitachis and running Raid10 - the performance of Raid0, the safety of Raid1...

Chris.
 
Ctann > Most of here already use seperate Boot / applications drives and 2 more independent drives for footage and rendering. I am now running with 3x250gb satas for OS, Footage & Renders. And a 500gb sata as a backup drive. Never respected backing-up until the day i lost all my hardwork spanning 2 years. Very bad move on my part.
 
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