help about hard drive
 

Is it better to build a system with a SCSI Ultra wide hard drive spinning at 15,000 rpm instead of a Utra ATA 100/7200 rpm?

Do you think a 15,000 rpm hard drive is better to avoid drop frames? Does it increase the overall speed of the NLE system?

Thanks
Philippe

A faster hard drive is always better for video. I don't know a great deal about hard drives, but a faster RPM means a shorter seek time when accessing data, which would translate to faster performance in NLEs and other programs in general. It would also mean less dropped frames as well, since a 15,000rpm drive would have no problem keeping up with a firewire stream!

The newer fast interface 7200 rpm drives are as fast in sustained throughput as my 10,000 rpm cheetah SCSI drives. Way fast enough for DV in RT. If you are at all worried, put two of them into a software RAID array in Windows 2000 or XP.

There just is no technical reason to need SCSI for DV. Even RT DV.

If you go to uncompressed video then you might want SCSI but that would be because you will need a lot of drives to hold much video and a SCSI interface is good for that.

You would be far better off from a performance standpoint to make certain your system meets the requirements of your video editing package and spend more money on memory and bigger drives. Maybe even a dual-head display card and dual monitors.

Use an Ultra ATA/133 drive and motherboard or controller for the max in speed.