Best drives for new build

[dad25]

I’m building my first rig and need some help with hard drive selection and set up. The system will be used primarily for video editing as well as general office type apps. I estimate the following capacity needs:

• 400 GB – captured video, photos, sounds, other source material, and project files
• 90 GB – OS and applications
• 100 GB – general data (Word files, mp3’s, spreadsheets, etc.)
• Unknown space for temp files, scratch, etc. while working on a one-hour long video project

I’ll also need space and a painless routine for imaging and backing up. (I do have a 500 GB external USB drive that I could use.) I would like, of course, to have the fastest and most reliable system possible (especially for video editing) within a budget of about $200 for drives. At current prices, it seems that would buy me one 320 GB drive and one 750 GB drive, or two 500 GB drives. What drives would you recommend and how should I partition them?

[TwoRails]

Hi dad25,

Welcome to PCMech !! :)

Something like this should fit the bill:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148274

You can sometimes find them on sale at your local Best Buy if you're not in a hurry. For example, I just picked one up from BB several weeks ago for $170 on sale no rebate required.

I love to partition, though some folks don't. It's easier to backup that way and defragging is quicker, too. You can use your scheme above for partition sizes. If you install all your programs on a different logical drive, you can make your OS partition smaller. This is about what I'd do with one 1TB drive:

20 - 25 GB OS (Win XP)
75 - 80 GB "junk" drive (Window's temp directories, email, browser cache, download directory, scratch files, etc.)
200 GB word processing, databases, mp3s, spreadsheets, etc.
Then the remaining in either one or two more logical drives for photo editing and video. I like my video on it's own drives and photos, sound, and source materials on another.

TwoRails

[glc]

The best drives out there in my opinion for speed, capacity, reliability, and value are the Seagate 7200.11 32mb cache. For your needs, I'd get 2 drives - probably a 500 and a 750. Use the 500 for the OS and apps and general files and the 750 for your video drive. Acronis True Image is my choice for backups, do them to external drives. I would get an Apricorn housing for eSATA for that, and put a big drive in it to supplement your USB drive.

[dad25]

TwoRails, thanks for the reply. So, you are in favor of partitioning because of advantages for back ups and maintenance, as well as some organization. You also are recommending just one large drive. How will this affect speed and performance for video editing? Most of the forums I have read seem to favor multiple physical drives in order to maximize performance.

Thanks, GLC. You recommend two drives. Hmm, two different schools of thought.

One terrabyte drive or two smaller ones--which will give be the better performance and how do I set them up... if just one drive, do I follow TwoRails suggestions on partitions? If I use two drives, how should I partition?

[Cricket]

I would go with at least 2 hard drives for your situation. Like glc, I would use a smaller hard drive for the OS, programs and other data files and a larger hard drive for your videos.

As far as performance goes, doesn't matter if you're using one hard drive or two...system performance would be the same.

I use partitions but only on the main hard drive (usually only 2 partitions...1 for OS and programs and the other for downloads and program installation files) and any other hard drive is just left as 1 big partition for data storage.

I defrag the OS partition once a week, the other partitions I defrag maybe once a month.

:) Cricket

[TwoRails]

TwoRails, thanks for the reply. So, you are in favor of partitioning because of advantages for back ups and maintenance, as well as some organization. You also are recommending just one large drive. How will this affect speed and performance for video editing? Most of the forums I have read seem to favor multiple physical drives in order to maximize performance. ..Yes, I "favor" partitioning. Sorry I was not clear on the number of drives line of thinking. My bad. For some reason I thought you were looking for a single drive in that price range.

Even in the days of DOS I've run two or more hard drives and am currently down to 6 physical drives in this box. With IDE I would even run (and still do) a hard drive as primary and a burner behind it on each channels for performance reasons instead of the traditional 2 hard drives on on channel and the opticals on the other. That old hot rod trick doesn't matter in the day of SATA, though.