Need a new hard drive
 

I'm currently running a P4, 2.66 ghz machine that has 2, 40 gig hard drives. This configuration has been satisfactory to date because my typical work involves :30 commercials.

Now I'm starting work on a 12 - 15 minute promo for a city industrial development commission. Thinking about adding an additional 250/300 gig drive for rendered avi segments and the final product.

Two questions....

1. Any recommendations on an ATA drive....I've been looking at Seagate

2. My editing program (Vegas 6) resides on my C drive and I have about 20 gig of free space on the drive. Is this going to work...will I be able to bring 5 or 6 rendered avi's to a final timeline and render back to my (soon to be) E drive that will have 250/300 gig of free space.

Thanks - David

David,
I believe that Seagate still has 3-5 year warranty drives which should be fine.
I'd stay away from the Maxtors; since they dropped the 3 year warranty the quality has gone South fast. My Seagate replacement for the dead 200GB Maxtor (1 month past the 1 year warranty) has been working well for a while now...quieter too.
You can set up Vegas to always use your new drive for all your video/audio files, including the temp files. Keeping these off your system drive will help speed things up, as will defragging the video drive regularly.
Hope this helps.
Ken

Ken,
Thanks...I had read somewhere that the Maxtor drives have some issues, nowadays, and there were not even considered...I'll do as you suggest as utilized the video drive for all activities...
Regards - David Bird

Everyone has different experiences... I have 4 Maxtor 160GB external firewire drives (which are ATA inside), a 100GB Maxtor firewire drive, and a 160GB Maxtor ATA internal drive. No problems whatsoever in two years.

The only drive failure I've seen in recent years was the stock IBM Deskstor drive that came with my G4 tower I bought two years ago. It died a week after I took the machine out of the box. They were infamous for problems though.

I also have several Seagate drives, and a Western Digital. They have been fine too.

Hi David,

Yeah, everyone's opinion is colored by their personal experience. I personally have had terrible luck with Western Digital drives and won't buy them; out of a total of 5 of their 60GB ATA100 drives, 2 still function after 3-4 years (I've got the 2 survivors RAID-0'ed together as a "scratch disk" for temp files for my NLE). I had been getting Maxtor drives and wasn't having any problems, but when I decided to get (another) 300GB drive, I actually was willing to spend a little more for a Seagate specifically because of the 5 year warranty vs Maxtor's now-measly 1 year warranty.

Regarding your question on space for your longer projects...
I don't use Vegas, but it sounds from Ken's comments like the recommendation is the same as for PPro (other Vegas users can pipe up if this isn't true!): your OS, NLE software and project files go on the C drive and your source files, "scratch disk" (temp) files, and final renders go on other, larger drive(s). So your 40GB drive should be plenty as a C drive.

If your motherboard doesn't already support Serial ATA natively, you may also want to spend just a few extra bucks to get an SATA add-in card. Performs a little better, no-fuss setup, and helps future-proof your drive. Then again, if you're REALLY needing to economize, Parallel ATA drives are SO cheap nowadays as they become yesterday's technology.

This is an interesting point, I didn't ever look at the warranties. I know nothing about the hard drive business, but just thinking here in general business terms...

If you warranty a product for 5 years, no matter how well made it is you are going to have a whole lot more claims than you would have had with the one year warranty on the same product. It costs Seagate real money to provide tech support and repair, and nothing comes for free.

Maybe Seagate drives are better? This stuff runs in cycles... I remember maybe 10 years ago many people looked down on them. But my only point is that even if two drives were identical you'd expect to pay more for the one with the 5 year warranty than the one with the 1 year warranty....

In the storagereview.com reliability database, seagate seems to be among the better brands.

2- I don't think which hard drive makes a big deal... they all have tradeoffs involving performance, noise, reliability? (hard to say which is best), and price. However, the hard drive you can get on sales are sometimes a good deal cheaper than newegg.com or whatever. If you check American hot deals sites, there are often rebate deals on hard drives.

Stangely enough, most drives in the 250 - 300 gig, 7,200 rpm, ATA 100 specs are pretty closely priced. Seagate 300 is $130, WD 250 is $150 but has a $50 rebate that expires on Sunday, Maxtor 250 is $160. Of all, the drive with the longest warranty is the least expensive...who knows...?
David Bird

Maxtor and Western Digital have one year warranties. Seagate has five year warranties for internal drives and one year for external. Hitachi and Samsung are three years.

Different people have had different experiences with each manufacturer, so it is hard to say who is the most reliable. For example, I've had three Quantum (bought by Maxtor), two Western Digital, and (just now) one Maxtor fail on me over the last four years. And due to the one year warranty from Maxtor we're stuck with the cost of replacement. From now on, unless there is a real good deal on a Maxtor/WD drive, I'm sticking with Seagate, or maybe Samsung.

I think it's important that you have a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 array for video editing... for speed or for speed and redundancy, respectively. I'm running 2 x 80GB SATA WD Caviar drives in RAID 0 and even that seems slow for video on an Athlon 64 3200+ w/ 1GB RAM and a 6800GT. Although it may take a little longer, I back up all of my data on DVD media... only things that will get it are a fire or theft (knock on wood)... HDs have moving parts and for some reason, I don't trust them (warranty or not, if it goes, your data's gone).

Alex,

Any single modern PATA or SATA drive has more than enough throughput for editing DV video's 3.6 Megabytes per second. RAID isn't necessary. In fact, in RAID 0 if one of the drives fail you lose the data on both drives, and with two drives there is twice the chance of failure. (Of course you've got everything backed up onto DVD, which is good.) Even my Matrox RT.X100 real-time video editing card only requires a single SATA drive for editing/export.

Moved to PC Editing forum (I have no idea what it was doing in the XL2 forum).

Hitachi 250GB SATA-II Deskstar t7k250 (8MB cache )
 

Hitachi 250GB SATA-II Deskstar t7k250 (8MB cache )

This is the drive I´d buy today. It is backwards comp. with SATA 1 but gives you the oppertunity to go to SATA II.

Almost the same price as the "older" SATA drives.

Good access times, good overall transfer rates and the drive has a decent sound level + it doesn't get all that hot.

// Lazze