External hard drive question!

[jgastelb]

I have a couple of external hard drives (500gig and 250gig). Should I be capturing into my hard drive and then rendering out to one of the external hard drives? I'm just thinking that editing footage that's traveling from an external hard drive through usb2 may not give me optimum performance. Can't afford the firewire just yet. I also have heard that one should render out to a different partition rather than on the same drive. Can someone put this into perspective for a better workflow.
Thanks!
Jgastelb

 

[Mark Harris]

I edit 720p on USB2 all day long.

And you should in general keep footage (and anything else you like) off of the system drive anyway. But I can't see why rendering would be affected.

But if you have the drives, why not test them out and see how the performance differs from an internal SATA connection, say...

 

[jgastelb]

And you should in general keep footage (and anything else you like) off of the system drive anyway.

Why? Because of a system crash? I'm just curious.
Jgastelb

 

[ullanta]

In general, data transfer is faster between two drives than on the same drive - you can imagine one drive reading continuously from one place, and another writing continuously to one place, pretty smoothly, as opposed to one drive looking for a source, reading a block, searching for the destination, then writing a block, then searching for the source again, etc - if you have two drives, you can hear this pretty clearly just by trying it out. The single drive is thrashing around and working a lot harder and slower.

Especially with low-end drives, the drive rather than the interface type is the bottleneck. So anything that involves moving a lot of data will tend to be faster when going across drives. This is especially true for export and such when the bulk of the effort is direct copying. If you are doing a processor intensive render, where the processor rather than the drives are a bottleneck, you won't see so much benefit.

As to why keep things off the system drive?

1) Sort of the same reason - the system frequently accesses system and application programs/data on the system drive, which can cause the same "thrashing" (excessive seeking) that slows down throughput.
2) The system has a lot of variable size temporary storage needs (VM, logs, caches) which can cause crashes or instability if the system drive gets too full for them to grow. It's best to leave a lot of space on the system drive, and not do anything that risks your filling it up - with temp renders, larger-than-expected exports, etc.
3) It's good to keep all your "easily" re-installable stuff on a different drive from your "unique" content. Some problems are easily fixable by wiping a drive clean and reinstalling everything - but this can become a nightmare if you have material on your system drive/partition that you can't afford to erase.

There are plenty of other reasons I'm not thinking of here... but these should do!

-Barry