There used to be audio/video rated harddrives. They did not park or recalibrate. I know Avid used them in their early systems. I assume there are still drives rated for video, but I have not researched it in a long time.

Dave T2

"I assume there are still drives rated for video, but I have not researched it in a long time."

There is but all the manufacturer says about them is they're designed for surveillance systems.

Bob.

If you are talking about the best single drive for video-editing it would be the 15k speed drives like the Cheetah line-up or the Hitachi 15k.
Very expensive, and the performance can be bested by slower matched drives on hardware raid configs.

SSD drives do not handle in the way that you want rendering drives to act. They may eventually come out with such an iteration, not yet.

7200k drives of Sata3 variant are very good for single - drives providing you don't have muttiple streams of video to support your edit and that you are not using uncompressed video.

Avoid green, blue drives. Only use black like the Model T.

I'm afraid I have to diasagree with you on SSD. Tom's Hardware continually says read/write performance will out perform mechanical drives and even the Cheetah. Sequential read/write is 2-3 times faster. Until very recently it has been a price performance issue.

Having said that Adobe's white paper on optimal performance still states 7200 rpm drives in RAID 0 is the best way to go, but they also include an SSD at a minimum for operating system and cache.

BTW I have had a few Seagate and Western Digital drives go south on me over the last 10 yrs. I think it was a Seagate high rmp that sounded like I had a dot matrix printer in my case :)

I have used Seagate drives for years (starting back in the 'Scuzy' days). I have never had one fail.

In more recent history I use Seagate 7200 drives in RAID 0. With the current PC it is SATA III. Of course, the problem with RAID 0 is if either drive fails, you are dead.

On the current PC I have SSD for drive C, boot drive. BUT, SSD is not yet ready for prime time. So if you use them get 3 and setup a RAID 5. You'll be glad you did.
RAID 5 is the best compromise between security and speed.

SSD speed will vary from brand to brand. Usually the write speed is much slower than the read speed. From what I have read the speeds 'advertised' are not the ones you get anyway. They say 'up to'. The big advantage is nearly no latency. Also, you don't have to defragment them. In fact, from what I have read it is better in the long run not to defrag.

Just My $2.00 worth (.02 cents adjusted for inflation).

Paul Masters

Now that I can agree with. They are prone to failure, but improving almost monthly along with price drops. Tom's Hardware always gives real world tests not what the specs say. I think they are coming from the fact of power consumption too. Large power supplies aren't cheap.

But the truth is no mechanical hard drive can feed a single SATA rev 3 pipeline to its full potential. SSD can get pretty close.

Clearly the best setup for editors is a rack of 15K SAS drives connected over fibre.
SSDs real world write performance is poor and they do degrade with use, the cost of 15TB of them would also be absurd compared to around $45K for a decent SAN.


Back in the real world.
Both the consummer HDD and control chip manufacturers appear to be engaging in the old smoke and mirrors stuff to fool us into thinking performance is better than it really is. Even worse I suspect their efforts might be degrading performance for our application. The Marvel SATA controllers drivers cache data, duplicating Windows efforts and gobbling up RAM.

There's an interesting investigation of the advantage of the "red" drives over the "black" offering from WD here.

Bob.

Np I see I can't overcome the rumors from two yrs ago on SSD. Some kinda true some not true. There are some real world current tests that have dispelled all of the bad press.

But truly think about this. If they write @ 145 MB/s verses read @ 450 MB/s it's very easy to say they don't write well, but then mechanical drives don't even come close. It's like statistics, you can say anything you want with the right numbers.

And I will point out that mechanical drives over fiber is a little pointless. Think of it like this. Fiber is the super-highway that is twenty lanes wide and can handle bumper to bumper traffic @ 100mph, but your mechanical drive is the output that can put out cars for 5 lanes @ 40 mph. Its pointless. Once again statistics :)

Currently, failures are their downfall.

Don't know Tim20 - you have made some interesting remarks in this thread of which I don' t see the point.

You seem intent on selling SSD in a raid config. for real world video rendering use. Please annotate for us a real world example of where this is being actually committed in a post house. I am not interested in the theoretical pipelines - give a a real example of a working setup.

It appears that the "red" variation of the WD drive tries to achieve some compromise between Green and Black , with performance leaning a little more to the Black than the Green - meaning a good thing for general usage. But I think I shall stick with black on well-designed hardware raids. Red may be just the ticket for performance in a Workstation setup with multi- drive layouts where one is assigned source of media, and destination is a different physical drive for rendering output. That is, the so called 3 or 4 separate drive equipped workstation.

"And I will point out that mechanical drives over fiber is a little pointless. Think of it like this. Fiber is the super-highway that is twenty lanes wide and can handle bumper to bumper traffic @ 100mph, but your mechanical drive is the output that can put out cars for 5 lanes @ 40 mph. Its pointless. Once again statistics :)"

Who would only run 5 drives in a SAN for a post house?
Even the one man show who did a onlline and grade for us runs 24.
Seagate claim a sustained transfer rate of 122 to 240MB/s, that's per drive.
Certainly I would agree that the total cost of ownership is moving in favour of SSDs due to reduced power consumption.

Bob..

"the problem with RAID 0 is if either drive fails, you are dead."

I had two Seagate 1.5TB drives in RAID0. The driver automatically enabled S.M.A.R.T., so when one drive started to fail (reallocated sectors before they became completely unreadable) it alerted me during boot up. The normally green report became yellow for that disk. I presume that if it had an unreadable working sector it would have shown red.

I hastily bought two more drives (different model) and replaced them while I could still read the data.

The faulty drive was under 12 months old and eligible for replacement under warrantee, but Seagate said that I had to return it via the shop where I bought it. Since it was over 3 months old, they in turn wanted to charge me a significant handling fee that was almost as much as a new drive, so I didn't bother. I didn't trust that model any more, so I didn't really want a new one.

Any of you tried this pci-e ssd? It seems like a great idea for throughput and is bootable, but the 2 reviews on Amazon seem to show that they are hit or miss.

Here's the link.

j razz

"It appears that the "red" variation of the WD drive tries to achieve some compromise between Green and Black"

My "red" arrived, I did resist the temptation to shoot an "unboxing" video and just as well. The only thing red about it is a small area on the label...which wasn't even stuck on straight. The rest of the drive is the usual boring black and silver, no red bling at all. I might have to mod the drive myself, time to get the airbrush out.

What I do like is my DF-85 case with its SATA backplane thingies.Open door, slide drive into place and good to go.

Bob.

"What I do like is my DF-85 case with its SATA backplane thingies.Open door, slide drive into place and good to go"

I understood that such drives were hot-pluggable (and therefore hot unpluggable). When I tried unplugging a drive while Windows was running, it brought Windows to its knees. I'll switch off first from now on.

Hot swapping only works if your BIOS is set to deal with the drives as AHCI and Windows was installed with AHCI support. Also, you must eject the drive using the Remove Hardware routine. If your drives are not set up for AHCI, then there is a method to enable it which involves editing the Registry and changing some BIOS settings. Then there are some motherboards that simply don't handle hot swapping well.

How bad is it to use greens? I have to admit, i have 3 of them in my main machine and never experienced a single issue with them. They just work and run cooler than the others. One of them, a 500, has been in there for over 2 years now. The other two are a 1T and another 500 about 1 year old.
But i do agree the reds do have a better rating. That is probably my next upgrade. But just saying, never had any issues at all with greens, in any performance or data rate respect. HD video, multicam, 96k multitrack DAW, and other intensive video apps - not a glitch. WD have always been my drive of choice. End of. Still have some WD IDE drives from 15 years ago - and they work!

Paul.

@VideoT. I never said anything about an SSD in RAID. I said they can read/write faster than a HDD. And I will defer to the guys at Adobe about optimzing performance. It's more than just high rmp sata's for rendering.

http://helpx.adobe.com/content/help/en/after-effects/urlpointers/other/video-tutorials.html

The Senior Product Manager for AE does another video basically saying the same thing.

"How bad is it to use greens?"

I use then a lot for backup and archiving. The objection to them is they spin at 5400 rpm compared to 7200rpm for the non green drives. The impact of this is all relative. The higher the areal density the lower the latency and average seek time. So todays slow spinning green drive are as fast the 7200rpm drives from a few years ago.

Bob.

The reds must be new. I had never even heard of them until i read this thread. I was only aware of black, blue, and green, with the blue being a sort of economical compromise between the extreme of black & green.

Supposedly the blacks are the only ones that allow RAID in firmware. However, all our systems perform RAID either on the motherboard or the controller card so we've been able to RAID the green and blues just as easily as the blacks. The only reason we stuck with the blacks in our production systems was because they come with a much better warranty than the blues & greens.

A curmudgeonly sysadmin i worked with for many years swore that all the drives were manufactured identically and that the only difference was that the the blues were the ones that didn't pass QC well enough to be labeled black, and the greens were the ones that didn't pass well enough to be labeled blue.

At home i use exclusively green because of the power saving and lower heat. They're almost cool to the touch even with constant use. They run faster than the 7200 RPM drives i have that are a few years older. Out of the 6 i've had so far only one went bad, and that was after 2 years of constant use. Some of them are coming up on 4 years old and still running fine.

I really don't have a need to know but when did this red, green, blue, black stuff hit the market?
JJK

I can remember the green/blue/black lines showing up probably at least 4 years ago. Last time i shopped for drives a month ago i didn't see any red, but i did see them today so they must be very new.