Recommended Hard Drive Size? - IndieTalk

sloaneparker · 12-02-2006, 10:43 AM

Hello,

I am making a digital film on my Mac and will be purchasing a hard drive on which to store the footage.

What is the recommended hard drive size that I should get for such an endeavor? I am plan on my film being 60-90 minutes in length when complete, which means that a considerable amount of footage will be taken and therefore stored on the drive.

What do you folks suggest?

Thanks in advance.

Spatula · 12-02-2006, 12:07 PM

One.... Million Gigabytes! Muhwhahahaha. (Dr. Evil voice)

I'd get at LEAST 300GB over a couple external HDs. Even that'll go quickly once you get 5 hours raw footage, 2 hours rendered previews, and 56 hours of timelapse of something.

sonnyboo · 12-02-2006, 01:03 PM

1 Gig = 4.5 minutes of DV footage (720x480 or 720x576 with DV codec)

28 Gig = 1 Hour of HDV footage (1280x720 MPEG2 HDV codec)

So a 300 gig internal or external drive would do the trick...

Boz Uriel · 12-02-2006, 02:15 PM

I'm running two 250 GB's (Samsung Spinpoint drives, very reliable). One holds raw footage while the other holds finished renderings.

Tom's Hardware has never steered me wrong. See for yourself...

www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html

Blade_Jones · 12-02-2006, 03:10 PM

For 1920 X 1080 uncompressed you'll need about a Terabyte. For offline editing with ALL of the footage, 500 GB should be fine.

oakstreetphotovideo · 12-02-2006, 03:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Blade_Jones

For 1920 X 1080 uncompressed you'll need about a Terabyte. For offline editing with ALL of the footage, 500 GB should be fine.

One hour of uncompressed 1920x1080 @ 24bpp, 24fps is about 1/2 terabyte, but who in their right mind works with uncompressed footage? Even lightweight, lossless compression can save huge amounts of I/O. A single stream of uncompressed video, as specified, would be around 140MB/second. It would take one hec of a RAID array with a serious, high end controller to deliver 3 simultaneous streams at 140MB/second.

I would not recommend an SATA hard drive based on these assumptions. Lets keep it real.

Loud Orange Cat · 12-02-2006, 04:48 PM

Rule of thumb: Always get the largest hard drive available because you'll eventually fill it.

My first hard drive in the '80s was a 48MB (That's right, Megabyte) full-height SCSI-1 drive. I thought I'd never fill it.

knightly · 12-02-2006, 06:12 PM

I have the same setup as Boz...works like a champ...I used to have 4 120Gb drives, one for importing the tapes, one for the logged/chopped footage I would actually be using, 3rd for renders and 4th for the system/apps.

sloaneparker · 12-03-2006, 02:33 AM

thank you all very much for your advice/recommendations. i really appreciate it!

freezer · 12-05-2006, 08:39 AM

I am currently using a SATA2 RAID 0+1 ((2+2)x250 GB=500GB) on a PCIe system (ASUS motherboard) with 3 GByte of memory and this delivers a very good performance. If you go for a bigger RAID with let's say (4+4)x250 GB you could get up to 180 MB/s average read performance.

If you have a bigger budget you could even get the Western Digital Raptor SATA with 10k rpm and 150 GB - those harddisks deliver up to 90 MB/s peak each! So 4 of them in a striped RAID could theoretically come close to the SATA2 limit with a 384 MB/s theoretical maximum.

knightly · 12-05-2006, 09:12 AM

10k hard drives die fast...they work great while they're running though! I work in a data environment, we stopped using the 10k drives as we went through them too fast. raiding 7200rpm drives together was much more cost effective.

knightly · 12-05-2006, 09:19 AM

I should say "relatively" fast...we used them hard (thousands of transactions a minute, 24/7/365.25)!

oakstreetphotovideo · 12-05-2006, 09:58 AM

In my experience, the theoretical maximums are never sustainable, and seldom even achievable. Real world benchmarks on a heavily loaded system are more useful than theoretical numbers. In the real world, there is seek time, rotational latency, bottlenecks in the bus, application delays, scheduler delays, etc.

I agree that RAID arrays are a great way to get solid performance, but I wouldn't want anyone to be mislead on what they can expect. Also, when editing DV or native HDV, the I/O requirements are easily met by one or two SATA or EIDE hard drives. I always recommend multiple drives when practical, to minimize head movement. If you've got the budget for it, and you've done your homework, a RAID is a great option. However, be warned that the SATA RAID boxes are often married to a specific controller, and there may be other technical considerations that may not be obvious.

I'm a firm believer in the KISS principle.

(Knightly, I still swear by SCSI drives for hard core performance in database and transactional systems; they just seem to be more reliable, although they can get rather expensive. For databases, I buy SCSI, but for video editing where capacity is generally more important than raw performance, I'm in the IDE/SATA camp)

freezer · 12-05-2006, 11:22 AM

@ oakstreetphotovideo

That is why I wrote 'peak' and 'average' performance

The very reliable German computer magazine c't does quarterly tests of harddisks where they measure real world performance which correspond with my own experience quite well. So an average of 45 MB/s read performance can be achieved by modern SATA-2 harddisks and PCI express.

If you are concerned by using controller specific RAID mechanism you can always use the WindowsXP onboard softraid - at least for a RAID 0+1, which keeps you independent from the hardware at least. For a fast RAID 5 you will need an expensive controller anyway.
There is a small patch at the c't homepage to activate the mirroring RAID 1 of WinXP Pro.

Raid Patch:
ftp://ftp.heise.de/pub/ct/listings/0503-090.zip

sloaneparker · 01-30-2007, 11:34 AM

Hi all,

I am resurrecting this post. I am going to go with a RAID system. I have a MacBookPro so would need to get a SATA adapter via my express port, since my machine doesnt currently have a SATA port.

Has anyone on the forum done this via the MacBookPro yet?

Also, how do you recommend I do my homework in this realm? Good sites> resources you can recommend? I want to be well informed before I make the dive for such a big purchase.

Also, people on the forum using RAIDs, do you notice performance/speed issues when editing via a RAID vs directly on your computer (with footage stored on computer instead of external HD/RAID)? And if there IS performance issues, how can they be avoided/rememdied in a RAID situation.

Thanks in advance for your advice!