internal or external as 2nd drive?

Chris Stearns

Chris Stearns

Well-known member
I'm upgrading my system and getting a second hard drive for video capture (leaving my existing one as a system drive). I'm wondering if I should get an internal or external drive. Are external usb 2.0 drives that much slower than internal ultra ata drives? I want to go external for two reasons; I wont be increasing the temp of my tower, and if my system crashes I can easily move my work to another NLE.
 
I use a external all the time with Vegas without problem. Seagate 300 GB in a generic external enclosure using USB 2.0.
 
Is USB 2.0 faster than Firewire? I'd chose a external that uses firewire ... I've got a Western Digital 250GB that has firewire and USB 2.0. I use it for back ups of important file, and overflow, but I prefer to use internal SATA or Ultra ATA for what I believe is better transfer speed.
 
Yeah speed is my biggest concern. Also, my motherboard is set up to handle 4 drives in RAID 1, 0, or 1+0. I think I may just get two 120mb WD 7200rpm drives and stripe them. I still am not sure.
 
Both USB2.0 and Firewire 400 are perfectly fine for DV25 material (should be fine for HDV too since it has the same data rate as DV25, someone correct me if I'm wrong).

Theoretical speed limits and synthetic tests aside, I haven't found either interface to be profoundly faster or "better" than the other. However, if going external, I'll always opt for a "combo" enclosure (USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces) for compatibility's sake.
 
I personally use 3 drives...I system drive, an 80 gig for a primary project drive, and a internal 300gb SATA drive that is dual partitioned for holding clips and sound fx.

Then I have a 40gig external firewire drive for project and data storage. Then after i finish a project I would hotswap out the drive and store the 40 gig for each project.
 
I once had a project stored on an external firewire HD. The transfer data rate was not the problem. The problem was when i had 100 Gb of videos, cut and trimed in the same timeline (it was a long shortfilm) and the HD was going crazy to move so fast from one clip to another. So it made editing a pain. It was not fast enought.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top