Dedicated drive
 

Hi,
I'm putting together my new PC for dv and hdv editing. Premier Pro specs say conserning hard drives: "Dedicated 7,200RPM hard drive for DV and HDV editing".

What exactly is meant by dedicated? Should the program files for premier be on it and the video files? Or just the program files or just the video files? And what if I want to use external drives?

Thanks for any kind of answer,

ART

Yeah you really want a totally seperate drive for video files especially if you are editing HD. I've never had a problem having project files and videos files living on the same drive but it should be seperate from your C drive that has your operating system on it. Hope that helps.

Chris Watson
Watson Videography
www.dynamovideo.com

The general idea is that your main drive will have thousands of little files on it which can lead to fragmentation and reduced performance. The operating system and applications are also constantly reading and writing to this drive.

Video files tend to be very large and there aren't usually a whole lot of them (compared to the number of files on the C drive). So keeping them separate on a fast disk will reduce the chances of dropped frames.

So an external drive, say for instance LaCie 7200 rpm for my video files is a good solution?

And furthermore: How big a difference is there between a Pentium D 820, 830 and 930?

cheers,
ART

If you are building a new pc you will get better, ie faster, read/write if your dedicated video drive is, say, your d drive inside your pc. An external drive will be slower - tho it may be able to cope. I only use external drives for archiving completed project avis and dvd folders.

For example, my sata video d drive produces 35MB/s read write but my usb archive drive (now c74% full) only achieves c14MB/s.

When you say external drives are slower than internal drives, why is this, or what are you referring to? The rpm? I have a Seagate 7200 rpm, 16mb cache 300gb external harddrive that I run using Firewire-400. My computer's internal harddrive only spins at 5400 rpm, not sure about the cache. Which one is faster? I seem to have no problems editing directly from my external harddrive though.

Chances are that an internal, dedicated sata video drive will give you faster read/write performance. I am not saying that an external drive will not work - obviously it will and it does for you and many others. I believe you will get faster bus speeds with an internal drive; and there is not the temptation to share that exists with external firewire/usb drives.