How Do you Manage your HD's?

MohammeD T wrote on 8/15/2005, 11:03 AM

Hi all , i would love to hear from you guys how do you set your drives, how many and what size do you have? how do you manage them from capture to author and save .. externals or internals and what do you recomend.. !!

i have 2x160's (internal) and maybe getting one (external) 250G , i would like to start the right way so later on everything is arranged , what do you think of having Vegas on the boot drive and capturing on the second drive , then rendering on the 3rd , and saving this on an external? am sure most of you here are more experienced than i am and ofcourse have a better set , so i would like to hear about your settings , thanks

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 8/15/2005, 11:22 AM

A lot of it will be determined by personal preference and convenience. There isn't any "right" way to do this. There are a few wrong things though. You should have a system/boot/software drive, typically "drive C:\". This is where all software gets installed. There isn't any advantage to installing Vegas or other programs on other drives unless your C:\ drive is just too tiny to hold them. Large media files should always go on some other drive. Windows often accesses the system drive. These accesses could interrupt the flow of data while capturing or playing back video files if these files were on the system drive. Keeping the media files on other drives avoids this problem.

Rendering to a different drive than where the source files are can speed up the rendering process to some degree. The difference may not be huge, but it is definately there.

Keep things neat from the beginning. When starting a new project, create a folder for that project and put all captured files, photos, sound files, .veg files, etc. in that folder. It makes everything much easier to find later on, and makes cleaning up after the project is done a snap.

Defragging is almost never useful.

Jsnkc wrote on 8/15/2005, 11:29 AM

Just built a new system. 3 - 250GB drives for video. 1 - 80GB drive for the OS and programs. We also have another external 250GB drive as well hooked up to the system. I always keep all the video and project files on the 250GB drives, I never put anything on the Main drive except for the OS and program files. That way when windows crashes...and we all know it will at one point...I don't lose any of my video and all I have to do is re-install windows and the programs.

MohammeD T wrote on 8/15/2005, 11:35 AM

Chienworks , thanks for the input , this is good news , what about rendering to a third External drive? does this Require firewire? my current external drive does not support firwire but only USB2.

jsnkc , what doyou use to conect your externals? thanks

Jsnkc wrote on 8/15/2005, 12:55 PM

The one external drive we have is a USB 2.0 drive from Maxtor. We rarely use it anymore since we have plenty of internal space now.

klimvid wrote on 8/17/2005, 4:06 PM

I have an internal 38GB drive for my system and programs; a second 250GB internal drive for capturing to and for holding all media resources (audio, stills, text); an external 250 GB Maxtor USB2 that I render to; and two external 120GB USB2 drives for backup. Works good for me.