External Drives...

[Tom Lowe]

My God. I just saw a Maxtor One Touch 500GB external drive for like $150! Only last summer I think I paid something $250 for a 300GB One Touch.

The problem for me is that I always seem to have about two video-editing projects going at any given time, which means I have Premiere Pro pointing to video files on my 500GBs of internal RAID (2x250GB). Which means I can't move any of those large video files off my PC itself, onto externals, to free up space. Which means I constantly have about 300-400GBs of my system tied up with stuff that's on my Premiere timeline.

Question: Are there any external drives I can use that would be fast enough to to use for video editing in a timeline? As it is, my computer can barely keep up with the large, uncompressed video files coming off my internal RAID.

[number6]

Tom, I purchased a Dell 8400 over a year ago, with a Raid 0 setup as a factory C: drive. The 8400 had two more internal SATA bays and a couple more cable connects for SATA, so I added two Seagate 300s and configured them as a separate Raid 0 D: drive. Took some doing, but I finally got the configuration done. Then, I purchased a SIIG pci-e pro Raid card with dual e-SATA connects, and put two Rosewill e-SATA enclosures with Seagate 320 perpendicular read/write HDDs in them, and configured them as an external Raid 0. I also use Adobe although only 1.5 at present, but waiting on shipment of CS3, and I pointed my scratch folder to my onboard D: drive. Works fine. Also use the external E: drive as a backup. Could probably substitute any equal sized drives you want and work just fine.

edit: OBTW, I also have multiple projects going, and I've even started storing different ones on the D: drive and the E: drive. Occasionally when opening up the latter, Adobe doesn't finish opening the project, but then I retry and it goes ahead and opens. Before you ask, I do not know why.

[Tom Lowe]

Hmmm... So are you suggesting I slap a couple 300GB drive into my Dell XPS 600 tower and set up another Raid 0 array? Might that overheat my PC? This sucker has a lot of fans running, though, (loudly!) so it would probably be ok.

I probably won't look into eSATA until I build my next PC sometime next year, which I plan to design around my RED needs. Will there be other options available by then? Maybe fiber connections to massive external drives?

edit: actually I see that i can get some 500GB SATA300 Seagate drives for around 110 bucks each. Could I add them into my PC for another 1TB of RAID 0?? :)

[number6]

Hmmm... So are you suggesting I slap a couple 300GB drive into my Dell XPS 600 tower and set up another Raid 0 array? Might that overheat my PC? This sucker has a lot of fans running, though, (loudly!) so it would probably be ok.

I probably won't look into eSATA until I build my next PC sometime next year, which I plan to design around my RED needs. Will there be other options available by then? Maybe fiber connections to massive external drives?

edit: actually I see that i can get some 500GB SATA300 Seagate drives for around 110 bucks each. Could I add them into my PC for another 1TB of RAID 0?? :)

No heat "problem" with mine, but you sure can feel the whole ambient surroundings being hotter than any of my other computers. Most people worry about a Raid 0 failure, but I think of it as each HDD doing half the work, and therefore, should last more than twice as long as a single drive (due to the fact that by striping, they are not being constantly driven wide open as a single drive might be.) I don't know about something better than e-SATA, but on Tom's Hardware Guide they recently reviewed an inexpensive SIIG e-SATA solution that would allow multiple HDD setups off of one hookup, much like the SCSI setups that have been so popular. Only problem is that even though they can be daisy-chained, the bandwidth is still the same and is just split up among whatever is being used. The benefit, as I recall, was that you could set up multiple drives and when one fills up, it automatically switches to the next one and you can daisy-chain drives of different sizes.

One thing about my oun experience with the pci-e e-SATA, I also set up a single 500 MB Seagate perpendicular drive on my notebook. I failed to set it up as hot swappable and now I think I would not be able to plug it in to my 8400 and have it read as just data, much like a USB 2.0 thumbdrive is readable on multiple computers. Can't change it now because would have to reformat and lose all data on my notebook e-SATA drive.

[Tom Lowe]

Actually, could I just drop a 500GB standard drive into my PC, to go along with my 2x250GB RAID 0 array? I don't really need RAID performance for the next 500GBs I would add to the tower. Would this work as a D drive? In other words, could I have the new 500GB drive just serve as a dump for non-video files and keep all my video-editing related stuff on the 500GB RAID array?

[number6]

Actually, could I just drop a 500GB standard drive into my PC, to go along with my 2x250GB RAID 0 array? I don't really need RAID performance for the next 500GBs I would add to the tower. Would this work as a D drive? In other words, could I have the new 500GB drive just serve as a dump for non-video files and keep all my video-editing related stuff on the 500GB RAID array?

Yeah, should just become another drive letter. I'm not cognizant of any difficulties you would encounter during BIOS setup. It's been awhile since I performed the previously described setups, so I can't remember the procedure exactly. Seems like it required some sort of initialization in XP's Administrative Tools,- Computer Management,- Storage,- then right click on the box representing the new volume and populating the volume or something. Doing a single internal drive should be easier than doing a second Raid, though, of which I'm sure you are fully aware.

[Tom Lowe]

Heh-heh, I'll just buy the drive from Dell and have their XPS technicians talk me through it. :)

[number6]

A wise choice. Should have probably done the same myself.