I’m often asked what’s the best way to configure your hard drives for video editing and how many hard drives do you need? I use four (4) drives not counting backup drives. I have my Operating System and all of my Applications on the C: drive. My D: drive is stock media which includes stock footage, media assets like Digital Juice backgrounds and music, as well as sample data for my VST Instruments for music composing. I also backup my C: drive to a folder on my D: drive. The E: drive is my project drive. All of my active video and audio projects are kept there including all of their media. Finally my R: drive is a RAID 5 that I use for archiving all of my projects and media once they are complete. I also keep my captures on this drive since I am now working tapeless and there are no longer tape backups. The RAID 5 consistent of 12TB WD RED drives that are specifically designed for Network Attached Storage (NAS) applications. You actually loose one disc worth of storage for redundancy so 4 x 3TB = 12TB – 3TB = 9TB of usable storage. Note: a RAID is not a backup so even though it can withstand one drive failing without loosing data, the RAID 5 is still backed up to several off-line hard drives.
The “rule-of-thumb” for a video editing workstation is to keep all of your video work off of the C: drive. If you have a C: and D: drive, create a project folder on D: and place all of your captured media in it, and save your project veg file to it, and do all of your work in it. You may ask why?
The “why” has to do with the way Windows works. The Windows OS keeps it’s swap file and temporary files on C: by default. It is constantly writing to them which requires hard drive activity. If you run low on real memory Windows will swap memory out to the hard drive. You don’t want windows swapping out to the same hard drive that you are trying to write to for your video work to because it causes contention for the drive heads. Other applications like Vegas are also writing temp files too to keep track of undo buffers and such which causes contention for the drive heads. All of this drive access could cause dropped frames during a real-time DV or HDV capture. It could just slow things way down for other write activities that are also memory intensive like rendering.
Vista was notorious for having a particularly poor an aggressive file caching scheme that seemed to always be accessing the hard drive. You just don’t want any of this OS housekeeping to interfere with your video work so the “rule-of-thumb” is to keep your work off of the C: drive for best performance.
It is important to note that we are talking about real physical C: and D: drives here and not a single drive that is partitioned as C: and D:. What we are after is two sets of drive read/write heads that can work independently. Partitioning a single drive is the same as having one drive in this case. You need two “physical” drives.
Some even suggest three physical drives with the third being dedicated to render. The idea is that during render you read from one drive and write to the other simultaneously which is quicker than doing it synchronously on a single drive for high speed transfers. This is particularly useful during smart-rendering when source is simply being copied to
Howdy JR! Hope to see you sooner rather than later.
I think VideoGuys is (are?) now recommending SSD for render drives, FWIW. I’m putting one in my next build just for that.
Hi David. Thanks for that feedback. I wrote this article without any hard drive technology in mind as it just deals with disk layout but using an SSD is always an option. I use an SSD for my C: drive. Rendering to SSD also seems to make sense.
I find that the biggest bottleneck when rendering is CPU/GPU processing so disk I/O is rarely what slows you down and since you will be reading several video files and only writing one, having a separate render drive of any kind is certainly an advantage to reduce read/write contention.
John:
I could not find a direct email to you without butting into this thread. Please excuse. You have helped me many times over the years I have been on Creative Cow. I read your ‘bio’ material on your folks and was very touched as it seems a lot like my experience with my mom (93). Thank you for posting that. I know the first thing your mom said when she join your dad was: Johnny wrote a book!
He knows, John and he is very proud of you, mostly because you help so many people. That is what it is about, helping others.
Bill
Thanks for the kind words Bill. They are the reason I am who I am, and I miss them every single day. Take care.
Thanks John, your tutorials, I’ve learn a lot.
Hi John. Nice article. I wanted to ask, how do you back up your C drive on D? Are you using some software to do scheduled backups or do it manually?
And what would be enough size for system drive? Some say that as much as you can get, but I don’t want to throw money in the wind.
Hi Jaanus, I have Acronis TrueImage set up to perform a daily incremental backup of my C: drive to a folder on my D: drive. The backups are just files that are images of the disk. This works because my C: drive is 256GB and my D: drive is 3TB so there is plenty of room for the backups. These backups run at 6:00am every morning and only take about 5 – 10 minutes to complete because it’s just backing up the changes from the previous day. Hope this helps.
Hi David. Great article!
I was wondering about the E: Drive containing your active projects. You don’t use a RAID configuration for that drive do you?What if that drive plays up?
I use to use a RAID 0 for my E: drive but I didn’t do that this time. It does give better performance and I may do it again but you have to make sure you back up your projects because a RAID 0 is twice as likely to fail as a single drive. That’s why I archive my projects to a 9TB RAID 5 which is then backup up to several off-line drives. That gives me 3 copies of the project while working on it and 2 copies once it’s archived.
I need a help to re arrange my prof editing pc configuration ….my configuration is
Intel Core i5-4670 k Processor or 4690(i am confusing to select the proc)
Asus B85M-g Motherboard or Giga bite z97d3h(i am confusing to select diz board)
8GB DDR3 RAM KING
1TB SATA Seagate HDD
500gB SATA Seagate HDD (for OS installing only )
Microsoft Multimedia keyboard& mouse
Zotac gtx 750 2GB DDR5 or msi 29 bd ?????
600 Smps cooler master
pls help me (limited budget)
The best advice I can give is to follow a guide like the excellent VideoGuys.com DIY 10 guide. They have carefully tested what parts work well together and offer parts lists for several different budgets. I’ve moved to Mac now so I don’t build Windows PC’s or follow the hardware choices anymore (sorry).