Ideal HD Video Editing Hard Drive(s)?

[Kata]

Hi again all,

My latest question: What would you consider the ideal hard drive(s) for the above task? I'm happy to go for two in RAID 0 if it will improve performance. The drive(s) will be for the data and rendering files and nothing else - program itself will be on the system drive.

[Whiternoise]

If you're going to be editing HD video, then size is presumably of the utmost?

Obvious choices would be 1TB or 1.5TB drives, and if you want to RAID them then there's that option as well. You probably shouldn't go for anything under 7200rpm either. Ultimately it's going to be how much video you're going to be editing and how often. A drive with 32mb cache compared to 16mb is probably a good idea as well. Realistically, i can't see there being a noticeable (in real world terms) difference between getting say seagate over western digital in terms of speed, in any case the bottleneck is likely to be your CPU or some other component rather than the hard drive. RAID will definitely help however. Whether you feel it's necessary to have multiple hard drives (or groups of) for different tasks is your choice (ie one drive for input one for output).

The prices are going to range from anywhere between 80-170.

[TheReaFireblade]

Yeah... the more capacity, the better.
The 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 is available for just £59.95 / £70.44 (+ P&P) - from Aria

[richieuk]

I agree with FireBlade, the Spinpoint should be 3x 333GB platters and will ultimatley be faster than almost any other hard drives at 7200RPM, it also has the 32MB Cache you require and for £70, you paying less than 10p per GB which is great!

[SiM]

I reckon it is better to get 4 or so 320gb hard drives and stick them in raid 0
if you get the 1TB, it is cheaper on scan today only £76.36 inc - plus you are less likely to get ripped off by scan

[Kata]

I already have 5 320GB drives lieing around, but the problem is that my new build will only have 2 SATA ports free

[SiM]

Get a PCIe raid card and job done