Question about hard drive space
 

We all know that the performance of your computer can suffer as the hard drive gets full. My internal drive is about 90% full. If I add an external hard drive and start to capture my video there, will my computer go back to 100% efficiency or will the fact that the internal hard drive is almost full still affect the performance?

The fact that the internal hard drive is almost full will still adversely affect the performance.

your performance will only be affected if your internal drive is also used to run your OS and software programs. However, if you have a different drive for that, then a 90% drive should not affect the performance of a third drive unless they are called into action in tandem (like reading and writing)

Sareesh:

My OS and software reside on my internal haerdrive. There is no third hard drive that comes into play. I'm talking about just adding a second harddrive to store my captured video and project files.

You really and truly need the external hard drive. Move all your video off the internal hard drive onto the external drive. Get a very big external drive or maybe a pair if you have a lot of video. If you have Firewire or eSata connections, use them rather than USB connections, especially if you are working with HD video.

My editing system had 4 internal drives. C: for the OS, D: for applications, E: for Windows memory cache and F: for projects. I'd archive stuff to the C, D and E drives once projects were done, but never fill them past 80%, which is still probably too much. Overflow kept on external drives or BD/DVD disks.

Your OS+Software Drive should never be more than half full for optimum results. Your system will be slow no matter how many drives you have.

I hate to wake up an old thread but it's better than starting a new one for the same information.
Should my video editing software reside on the same drive as my video archives or should I store nothing but video on my dedicated video hard drive?
And is there any specific reason why so many reference an external Hard Drive? I purchased a second SATA internal hard drive for my editing drive. 10,000 rpm.

The video editing software and the video archives (or video source drive) should be on separate drives. If the software and the video source (or archive) are on the same drive, the system performance will be effectively degraded to that of the single-drive-for-everything setup. The reason: SATA is still only a half-duplex interface, which means that data can only go through the SATA interface in one direction at a time (in this case, read or write - SATA cannot do both simultaneously for a single device).

I thought so. Thanks for the conformation. Another kind fellow answered this for me but I was unsure if I understood him correctly. This is a great help. I'm going to load my editing software on the same drive as my OS and I'm going to put nothing but video on a 10,000 rpm drive I just purchased. It's only a 300 GB drive but I'll archive to BluRay before it is half full.
Thanks again. Much help.

Thanks, That answers my question too...........

I have an older Desktop Mac (twin 2 Ghz/2GB RAM/160GB HDD - only!), which I use for HDV editing.
The 160 GB HDD holds only Final Cut Studio and the OS, that brings it down to 98.5 GB.
All Video and project files are on a 2TB external LaCie HDD, the volume: about 730 GB.
Recently, when I tried to open 3 projects, which hold the 730 GB, the last one took about 5 minutes to open,
and when trying to commence editing, I was unable to even open the clips, another time they came in a monochrome green with a boxed info: Memory low.
Previously I was working with a 1 TB external HDD (also LaCie) with 500 GB worth of clips, and exactly the
same HD space (98.5 GB), which worked fine.
I edit on a wildlife documentary and need access to all material (730GB) in the browsers simultaneously.
After transferring the lot from 1 TB to 2 TB recently and adding some more clips along the way, I expected to have no problems with my setup to about 1.3 TB on my external HDD, but to no avail.

For someone who has an answer to that, I would thankfully lift my hat.

Cheers, Gerd

Are those 4 physical drives? or just 4 partitions?