Best Hard Drive for Video

I keep getting told this is a good question but no one can advise me to
a good answer.
I have a video editing PC workstation with one Raptor C-drive and two
300GB Western Digital SATA hardrives for source video projects.
This PC is also connected to my server which simply stores graphics,
music and serves printers and stuff.
Here is my question.
I need to add more video hard drive space (I know, I know I just can't
delete the projects I have on there right now, and don't want to
re-capture that video)
So should I
1.) Add another SATA drive ( I would have to buy a PCI-SATA card, my
mobo only has 2 ports)
2.) Add another EIDE drive ( I think I have one EIDE spot left for
this)
3.) Add an external USB 2.0 drive
4.) Add an external Firewire drive
5.) Add a dedicated video drive to my Server (which is connected via a
Lyksis wired hub)
6.) Add an SCSI card and start a daisy chain of drives (too $ ?)
Basically I'm wondering If I will see performance issues between these
different scenarios.
I will be capturing video to this new drive, creating Vegas projects
that incorporate this video
and then render the project.
Will there be different performance issues in the Capture, Editing or
Rendering tasks?
I'm assuming this may continue to grow.

PLEASE ADVISE,
Rick

 

Rick,

I don't think your problem is unique or especially complex. Adding hard
drives for video is not unlike adding them for any other purpose, except
that you may be a bit more careful about transfer speeds if you intend to
capture high def content. Most standard definition video requires disk
transfer rates which are well within the performance range of most cheap
7200 RPM drives, and Raptors are not needed. Bus saturation can become a
problem if you are trying to do multiple video captures or transfers
simultaneously, and therefore Firewire (and especially USB 2) are
problematic if using more than one external drive for video capture.
However, PATA/EIDE, SATA, and SCSI all do very well with supporting 2 or
maybe 3 drives running at high I/O rates simultaneously, a situation few
people need or use. RAID offers some reliability advantages and can also
boost speed, if you have mission-critical content to deal with.

If your growth needs become more concrete, it would be easier to offer you a
specific plan. It is tempting to say "Add another EIDE" drive since it does
not require, in your case, another controller, and will certainly have more
than adequate speed if you buy a 7200 RPM drive.

Adding another SATA or SCSI drive only makes sense if you intend to add
more drives and need the eventual expansion of another controller card.
Since you can buy very large (500 MB) drives cheaply, it is hard to imagine
needing to add several, but you may have very large volume production to
handle, and have not stated this yet. As you are probably aware, MPEG2 video
such as found on most DVDs requires about 2 or 3 GB/hour and lightly
compressed DV video (avi format) or high def HDV requires about 13 GB/hour,
so you could store tons of video on a single 500 GB drive. Uncompressed high
def video is another story, which I suspect is not your area of interest
based on your question.

I would not recommend using a video server and moving video back and forth
to your workstation for editing, rendering, etc. The network imparts too
much of a speed penalty to make this a fast solution, although there are
situations where a client/server arrangement makes a lot of sense for video.
My home SageTV system serves a half dozen PC "clients" around the house with
a PC video server which records and stores MPEG2 video, and this type of
situation makes sense because there is no editing or interactive transfers
other than pure streaming of video from server to clients.

Rendering is, however, a special case worth mentioning. The slowest part of
video authoring and editing with Vegas and most other programs is the
rendering step, and Vegas specifically offers a method to spread the
rendering over more than one machine. This process is worthy of another
thread if you want to investigate it further, but it does offer a
significant speed up for some production workflows. This may or may not
matter in your particular case.....

Hope this helps and provides some answers to your questions.


Smarty

 

RickWarda wrote ...

My favorite:
7) Get a USB2 to IDE "cable" and just plug in raw drives
into the computer as needed. I now just keep a bunch of
raw drives on the shelf and plug them in as needed. No
need to power down (as I had to do with the plug-in
drive shell/drawer, etc.) It is fast, and cheap, can't hardly
beat that. Can't remember whether the last ones I bought
were $8 or $12 each.

 

I use 5 drives, all work great (1.2 TB). 2 are EIDE, 2 SATA, and one
on a PCI card for SATA, so there's room for even more.

With what you have, go ahead and add another EIDE drive. They're often
cheaper than SATA, and work fine. Adding a PCI card controller will
work fine also.

If you want an external box, use Firewire. I don't recommend USB2.
While it's speed is published as 480, faster than a 400 Firewire,
that's burst speed. Sustained is closer to 200. I tried it once with
an external drive with bad results, but that may have been my setup. I
don't know about the USB to EIDE trick.

For sure, operating system on C drive, capture to a different drive,
preferably on different controller. Then edit, and when finished,
render to a 3rd drive. Don't render to the same drive as your raw
capture material, you might lose 25% time or more. After the render
you can always transfer the final file back to any other drive as
desired.

I've also used external Firewire boxes with good results. Hot swap is
OK, daisychain is OK. Even works well with my 3 yr old laptop.

Jim McGauhey
Washington State

 

"Scubajam" wrote ...

OTOH, I have had perfect performance from over a
half dozen of those very cheap USB2 to IDE cables
used with several different desktop and laptop PCs.

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=USB2IDE-N&cat=CBL&cpc=CBLbsc
They are currently selling for $ 8.50 (including power supply)
I think they are great. I just ordered a couple of them for
my SATA drives, also.

 

I paid about $5 more when I bought mine, but it was still worth every penny.

Notice that there is a new version advertized on the same page.
For a dollor more, you get a version that works with 2.5" drives as well.

David

 

Right. But those "laptop drives" sell for premium prices
(GB/$) that make them unattractive for storing video.
At least in my world. YMMV

 

Actualy I wasn't thinking about storing video on them specifically.
Laptop drives are not only expensive, but usually a little slow too.
The only point was that for a dollar extra, you can handle both
normal 3.5" "internal" drives, and also the little laptop drives.

For instance, when I rebuild a system that I have been using for
a long time, I usually put in a new boot drive and keep the old
drive so that I can still fetch anything that was on that drive.

While that isn't too hard to do with a desktop machine, there isn't
any provision for a second drive on a laptop. Since I keep my
old drives, it is really handy to be able to connect an old drive to
any machine without having to install it in the machine (which
requires a reboot). In fact you don't even have to install it in
anything or reboot to try a different drive. Very handy indeed.

David

 

Brilliant. I haven't had to recover a laptop (yet), but
that is a great solution.

 

I've been thinking about adding a second HDD to speed things up and
give me a bit of elbow room, so this thread is timely...

Interesting that (at least for 100-200GB drives on newegg.com), the
SATA drives at 3.0Gb/s can be less expensive than the ones at 1.5Gb/s.
Why? Because the 1.5Gb/s are all 10,000 RPM, while the less-expensive
3.0Gb/s drives are 7,200 RPM.

I couldn't find a PCI card to add 3.0Gb/s SATA ports. (I think it may
have to do with the limitations of the PCI bus itself.)

I may just get a SATA drive and a PCI-SATA card ($21), and plan on
moving the drive into a new CPU someday. (I'll also need a power
supply connector, since my PS doesn't have a SATA power connector).

Not having shopped for HDDs lately, this was a surprise: You can get
many 7,200 RPM SATA drives *cheaper* than the corresponding 7,200 RPM
ATA100 drives. Examples: http://tinyurl.com/a6u4g vs.
http://tinyurl.com/fem8c

It seems like having the drives on different controllers is almost a
necessity in order to see a performance gain from separating them if
this Wikipedia article is correct: http://tinyurl.com/gjyv4 (See
"Serialized, overlapped, and queued operations").

Why not render onto the boot drive? It doesn't seem like writing the
rendered file could be a bottleneck in the process (especially with
write-behind caching), as long as it's not sharing bus bandwidth with
the capture material.

 

Higher technology gets cheaper as we go along.
SATA is a more recent technology and is getting
all the development while IDE is now a "legacy"
technology. SATA is also cheaper because it uses
few wires.

As the density increases, you can get faster transfer
rate without resorting to jet turbine 10,000 RPM
screamers.

Because the operating system uses the boot drive for lots
of overhead things (related to your video processing AND
other things) that will decrease your throughput. Best
avoided altogether as cheap as hard drives are these days.

It is sharing bus bandwidth with the OS overhead.

 

Very interesting and well said Richard. Thank you ...

 

Until they're free and install themselves, I'm still going to put at
least a little consideration into the need for it.

Bear in mind also that in my case (and probably other amateurs on the
NG) the CPU is not the latest and fastest; it simply can't do the
rendering work fast enough to saturate a disk bus with output.

If I were doing HD or trying to make money doing video, I'd certainly
not think twice about adding more power. (Although I'd still think
about *where* to add it.)

OK, is there something wrong with this (very approximate) math?

Say we're rendering to MPEG-2 at 15Mbits/sec (the peak rate for
standard DVD, right?) in realtime (I know my CPU can't come close to
it, but I'm sure somebody's can).

A mediocre physical hard drive can transfer at a sustained rate of
40MBytes/sec (or ~320 Mbits/sec). The ATA/100 bus can transfer at
100MBytes/sec (or ~800 Mbits/sec). This means that the act of writing
the MPEG file takes only about 5% of the drive speed and only about 2%
of the ATA bus capacity. I can't believe that the OS is going to use
so much of the bus bandwidth that 2% is going to matter. Even
considering inefficiencies, overhead, etc., could it be 10%?

If we're rendering to DV at 36Mbits/sec in realtime, that's still only
11% of the drive capacity and about 5% of the ATA/100 bus capacity.

 

Those are the limitation numbers, actual IDE hard drives transfer nowhere
near that, 7 mb/s if you are lucky and can handle 2 streams of dv barely. A
raid might get close to double that, say 11-13mb/s. At least in my benchmark
tests.

PS I just ordered one of those USB to IDE gadgets to transfer files from old
drives without having to open the pc and fiddle with wiring, at that price
it's a bargain. Thanks Richard.

AnthonyR.

 

Theoretical numbers. In the real world things don't necessarily
run as well as the published lab specs. Furthermore, the OS
can do things in bursts on its own timetable unrelated to your
wishes. Not worth slogging through all that when hard drives
cost well less than $1 per gigabyte.

 

Exactly, and I had forgotten to mention in my earlier post that drive
manufactures always post maximum burst rates, that doesn't help someone
doing video editing. To them the sustained data transfer rate is more
important in that case, and it's more like 7mb/s than the 100mb/s limit of
the bus.

Thanks again for the geeks.com tip, wow..they shipped that usb to ide out
same day and I seen it elsewhere afterwards for $29, cool.

AnthonyR.

 

I'm in the process of upgrading my system for improved video too.
They will get installed this weekend (including an e6600 upgrade).

For you, the smallest change for the biggest return, IMO, would be to
buy
two Seagate 320GB vertical-recording 7200.10 drives for under $100
each from Newegg (w/free shipping). Then put them together RAID-0.
These seem to be very fast drives (the new recording method is very
dense on the disk so transfer is FAST even at 7200 rpm). Raid-0 makes
it go twice as fast as that. Blazing 640-GB for under $200 (or maybe
$250 if
you need a PCI controller for the extra ports -- although those two
drives
should be able to saturate the PCI bus .

If those current 300Gb drives can be handled as well on the same
controller (and you've backups to use for transfer to-and-fro), you
can RAID-0 the pair of them too. Video does seem to so like very
fast disks (not that anything likes slow ones).

That'll give you over 40 hours of FAST added DV video space
for little money. .

SATA vs SATA2 isn't to be worried about. it's a secondary speed
thing where speed off of the disk proper and things like RAID-0
make the huge differences, especially with video where the data
is huge and will use full tracks rather than being something
seek-limited zipping around slowly (where raid-0 won't help either).

 

IME, better to use the two drives as separate entities rather
than lashing them together in any kind of RAID configuration.
You gain more from having separate source and destination
spindles (as when rendering or transcoding) than you gain
from any (dubious IMHO) speed "gain". How many more
times faster than DV do you need?

 

Kind of relating to the "Pro or not?" thread...

Even with the real numbers, the CPU in my case is so much of a
bottleneck that the boot drive doesn't even feel the difference in
writing the rendered data. Windows Task Manager tells me that the CPU
is at 100% utilization rendering to DV-AVI at about 1/5 realtime. As
for the OS, you're right that it can preempt other processes, but in
doing so, it's also taking up CPU time, which is the scarce resource
here.

I think the "3 hard drives" (system + source + render) suggestion makes
plenty of sense only for someone who's got a CPU fast enough to turn
the drives or ATA/SATA bus into a bottleneck.

Anyway (and not surprisingly), adding a SATA drive for source material
made a definite improvement over the single-drive situation I had when
I first decided to try playing with video. (That's what it is, BTW:
Playing. If I were expecting to make money doing it, I wouldn't be
asking these questions.)

 

"Theodore" wrote ...

It has nothing to do with CPU speed. It has everything
to do with disc access time (which is mechanical and
VERY slow compared to the wimpiest CPU). Just the
sound of your head assembly thrashing back and forth
and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth
and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth
and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth
while rendering is plenty of evidence without even
knowing the CPU speed.