Hard drives for editing?

J

Jonathan12uiz

Well-known member
Ok so I'm no pro, I've been using an iMac and a MacBookPro to edit my photos and videos.

My setup is currently using both computers.

Finished information is stored on a 500GB ex hdd (ext powered,vented and fan cooled) that is connected on the network though pogoplug.

Current projects and basic computer files that need to be shared are located on a network drive 1TB (ex, powered vented and fan cooled)

And current video projects are edited on the MacBookPro off a 1TB (ext powered, vented, fan cooled) HDD.

My question is with all this new technology... are non externally powered HDDs safe to leave ON all the time and are they ok to edit on?

I don't what the thing to melt on me and loose all that data...

for example I want to buy some more 1TB HDDs but I don't want external powered ones so that my editing station can be more portable.

but will the stress of editing off them and/or leaving them connected to the network 24/7 kill the HDD?
 
There should be no issue leaving them running, especially if you have a fan on them. 7200 rpm basic sata drives should be fine since your not doing major production editing.
Always backup anything important to 3 locations.

1. original files
2. copy to another drive
3. copy to another drive at an offsite location
 
I know the fan cooled ones will be safe, but what about solid state HDDs? or usb flash drives? Will they be ok being run 24.7
 
Your biggest concern is the speed at which you can read/write to the drive especially if you plan on using it for editing. Reliability, although important, isn't much of a factor if you maintain a backup/archiving system and buy drives with 3-5 year warranties. For externals, look into glyph type drives - you can get them in two disk configs running RAID 1 so if one fails, the other has you covered. Otherwise, externals with ESATA will be you best bet, followed up by firewire 800 and USB 3.0. I'd stay away from SSD's for now since the price per GB is extremely high relative to standard HDD's. Aim for external cases that have fans.

Not sure why you would use USB flashdrives for anything other then transferring files between systems. To edit off them would not be wise.


You might also want to consider a central NAS array with multi TB storage since you have multiple systems that need access to the same data. I've worked for firms that primarily relied on external drives to store and back-up data and it becomes really messy after a while.
 
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Let me put it this way:

During production and especially post production of my feature Marianne last year, we stuck mostly to regular brand external drives. 7200rpm, 32mb cache, some USB some eSata. We've probably burnt 8-10 discs.

Lacie has worked best. Seagates die immediately. We even lost a blackarmor after two weeks of production.

Read more about it here:
http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?226997-Seagate-More-like-Suckgate!


Next time I'm working on a project like this, I'm getting a NAS with five 2tb internal drives. Internal drives seem to last longer.
 
the last one or two generations of seagate drives are absolutely awful in terms of reliability; for the time being I stick to samsung
 
My personal preference is Western Digital, I've never had a WD drive fail on me, not even ones in a 10 year old PC I have...

SSDs are great if you can afford them, especially for running your OS and apps on, as everything will load lickedy split. As a general rule you never want to have your scratch disk/rushes on the same drive as the OS, as the drive will be trying to perform too many operations (without enough read/write IOs this will become the main bottleneck)

I also second the multiple backups idea, at work we triple and quadruple backup important client data for at least a month after it is procured. RAID redundant systems are also great, but they only protect against operational hardware failure, not damage or theft of course, so offsite backup is really a great idea. With the advent of mobileme, dropbox and cheap dedicated web servers there isn't an excuse for a professional who works with very important files not to have something backed up offsite. Another alternative is to just courier the hard drive offsite and store it in a safe somewhere...
 
I' ve always had the opinion that these failures are USB related, i have more than 7 dead harddrives and two of those are Lacie models. The reason why i think that they are USB related is that all my old IDE drives connected or added to my computers are still running wheneverr i start those old machines to get some files. My harddrive problem started with the external USB connections, in as much as i would want to think that USB is an incomplete technology, i stop and think that it works very well on phones and thats it, on other components where USB swapping is regular, it has always failed me, regardless of the safe removal procedure.
 
qap15 said:
I' ve always had the opinion that these failures are USB related.
Click to expand...

not my experience: all my drives are internal

the problem with the recent seagates is that they start doing some click-clack thing randomly; while that happens the pc freezes; with time it happens more often, then the drive dies (may resurrect a few days later, just enough to copy any non-backed-up data, but at this stage the drive is so problematic you don't want to use it)

of my 5 seagate 1.5TB drives, one is already dead, two are click-clacking occassionally (about once per hour; I expect them to die young too)

a search for "seagate click of death" (without the quotes) on google delivers lots of scary stories
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seagate+click+of+death&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=

my other 3 drives are samsung (1x1TB and 2x2TB), and they work perfectly fine
 
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