Multiple HDD Set Up?

[Superjombombo]

Hello friends, I'm working on my second build, but I've never worked with multiple drives before. Everything I seem to hear about them is all about Raid, which I understand, but don't think I want. I'm hoping you can tell me if my basic idea+setup will be ideal for my needs . I do a lot of video editing/rendering, several hours per day of rendering. I've often read that the HDD is often the bottleneck, so I wanted to get multiple HDD's. My setup will include one SSD for my important programs+OS, and two HDDs. One will have the raw footage/unfinished products, and the other will have the finished products. One read HDD, and one write HDD. Does that make sense for my needs? Thank you for any input on the subject, I can't seem to find much information about multiple HDDs not in a RAID configuration.

[mosin40]

In that case, raid won't be necessarily.

[Keystone Nyan Cat]

If you do plan on using multiple HDDs to boost the time it takes to load and save a workload, I advise against having the HDDs separately since you are essentially getting only the performance of one drive. If you set them up in RAID 0 (the data is spread across two drives), your throughput and storage size will essentially double, halving the time it takes to load and save projects, with the only drawback being that if one of the drives fail, you lose all your data.

 

To overcome this problem, you cant try checking the drives for bad sectors and other problems using HDTune before setting them in RAID and possibly having a cheap, other drive as one for saving your final videos.

 

My reasoning for this is that it's most likely you will be dealing with RAW data which is long and big (will hence benefit from the size and speed of RAID 0), and when you are done with a project, it will mostly be much smaller, and will hence make sense being saved first quickly transferred to the RAID0 setup, and then in the background be copied (not moved) to the smaller HDD.

 

I hope this helps!

[Dimwitted]

I disagree. The complexity of RAID and the fragility of it would preclude it from my workflow. I would prize stability and reliability over pure speed. Your O/S is on the fastest thing going. Having two separate drives is good. Writing data to your alternate drive is a no brainer because you can always go back to what you're doing while Windows writes. They key is leveraging the multitasking ability and the multicore aspect of both your hardware and software. This is why you go with multiple drives.

 

TL:DR Stick with your plan. It's a good one.

[ErrorNumber419]

I would suggest one or two mechanical drives for big data, and a 250GBish SSD for OS and maybe a few big programs like Adobe or whatever it is you're using for editing. It sounds like you are more concerned with having easy and reliable storage over real time redundancy and crazy performance. In that case I would agree, raid is probably not for you.

 

So lets say you have a 250GB SSD, and a 1-2 TB working drive for active projects (WD Black or similar). Add onto that a 3-4 TB slower, less power hungry drive (WD Green/Red or similar) for archiving/backup (I prefer reds for their longevity but it depends on your usage and budget).

 

Video takes up a lot of space, especially RAW video. Whatever your working drive is, I would get one double that size for your archive/backup.

 

 

In an ideal world I would suggest an additional external solution for your backup/archive that is not in any way dependent on your primary system (such as an External HDD, home server, or NAS) but that my be out of your price range. Just remember, redundancy =/= backup. ALWAYS go for a true backup over redundancy every time.

[Superjombombo]

Thanks for the ideas and help guys. Much appreciated!

[elkenrod]

2nd SSD for scratch?