ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

6 years, 6 months ago - Alwyne Kennedy

You should me using 7200rpm drives.

I presume when you say "regular storage drives" you mean internal hard drives (not SSD). You say editing on your existing drives is slow - check to see if your existing drives are 7200rpm. Also, do your drives need defragging?

I presume you have more than one drive on your system? If you don't, add one. Dedicate the second drive to your project video / audio files, and the preview / cache files.

Not sure why you think an external hard drive should be faster than your internal drive. Your internal drives are likely to be SATA, giving a faster transfer rate than you would get on an external drive. If you do get an external drive, make sure your computer has USB 3 or eSATA interfaces.

With my desktop system, I have an 250GB SSD for programmes and the OP, and I use 4TB 7200rpm hard drives for storage, adding new ones if a project calls for more storage. I don't use a RAID system, but when working on a project, I regularly back-up the storage drives to identical back-up drives, and I also back-up my SSD to an identical SSD.

By the way, I see today you can now get a 4TB SSD for £624, which would offer the fastest editing option as there is no spinning disk or moving parts involved in reading/writing to SSDs. https://www.ebuyer.com/824752-samsung-860-evo-4tb-ssd-mz-76e4t0b-eu

6 years, 6 months ago - Sue Carpenter

Thanks Alwyne. By regular drives I meant external eg WD elements, which are only designed as storage, not to edit from. Do you favour any particular brand of 7200rpm drive? Also I have been offered a Netgear RN10200 Nas system with 2 x 4TB Seagate IronWolf ST4000VN008 drives. Does this mean anything to you or anyone else, and would that be a good option?

6 years, 6 months ago - Alwyne Kennedy

You say you have an iMac, I'm not knowledgeable about Macs at all - PC user since mid 80s, but never used a Mac. Is it a desktop model? Can it accommodate extra internal drives? What exact model iMac do you have (I could check its specs).

How have you connected your WD Elements to your iMac? USB 3? If only USB 2, that would be slow.

I did a quick search and could not find what spin speed WD Elements drives operate at. That suggests they are run-of-the-mill, for if they were 7200rpm, I think they would shout about that feature.

You asked what drives I used. I bought several 4TB HITACHI 0S03665 but that model seems to be no longer available. I also recently bought some 2TB 7200rpm hard drives. They were good value - Toshiba 2TB P300 Internal Hard Disk Drive/HDD HDWD120UZSVA They can be bought for £53.99 each from Scan Computers.

I had a quick look at the Netgear RN10200 and I was not sure what it was for? An external Raid drive with cloud back up? Doesn't look like it will be a speed king. It seems only to offer USB 2, not 3, although it does have eSata (but I don't know what version). The Seagate IronWolf ST4000VN008 drives you referenced are only 5900rpm.

You know, there are many other reasons why your editing might be slow. Slow video card, for one thing.

6 years, 6 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

NAS etc are great, but if speed is your prime concern, you need specialist hardware RAID or SSD. There's often confusion about RAID, the number means everything, whether it's fast and dangerous, slow and safe, slow and dangerous, or fast and safe! RAID itself just means Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs - that's a way of saying "multiple hard drives arranged logically".


RAID0 can be a little faster for writing and reading as it treats the whole array of drives as one big one, so can spin to different parts of the whole mess more quickly with multiple heads - but at great risk with a fault potentially wiping out everything.

Raid1 is a mirrored pair of discs which has slight write speed LOSSES but read speed gains, and you can lose a drive and keep working until you replace the failed unit. You also pay for 2 drives but only get the capacity of one!

RAID 5 & 6 are less rugged than a mirrored pair, but more efficient use of space (by striping each drive across the others in the array, so any one drive can fail and be recovered)

RAID 10 is in many ways the best of the lot - it's RAID 0 and Raid1 combined, so mirrored pairs of big discs. Meaningless without 4+ hard drives, though! Being mirrored, not efficient with space, but rugged.

SSD are WAY faster than hard drives, massively. They're like a big thumbdrive.

In short - it's complicated! Those aren't even all the options, and certainly not all the configurations. You'll need to appraise not just the cost, but whether you're writing a lot or just reading, how much risk you want to take with drive failure, etc.

One option might be to get a good size SSD and have some programme back it up continuously to a large (much cheaper) hard drive. That'll give you fast access with the replication happening in some slack cycles. SSD aren't cheap, mind, and they do wear out over time. Look at crucial.com for high quality/genuine original SSD if you go down that route - never had a problem with them and they really are the stated capacity unlike some ebay cheapies.

6 years, 6 months ago - John Lubran

What a great team we have on SP. Such learned advice on tap.

6 years, 6 months ago - Sue Carpenter

Thank you all for your advice. I need to do some more research I think. And yes that NAS set up looks too slow.
I’m working on a short doc at the moment on a Lacie rugged with thunderbolt which was fine and then suddenly went on a go-slow. I think I need to create more proxies for some 4K footage but also wondering is there any possibility that bringing iPhone footage at 30fps onto a timeline that’s 25fps would send it into a tailspin?
(As you can tell, I can edit but I’m not an editor!)
Thanks again for your help.

6 years, 6 months ago - John Lubran

Oh and another thing. If ones edit suite is used for general Internet browsing, social media, unwanted and/or badly designed apps and other activities, it can be vulnerable to viruses, and other processes that can compromise its function in a number of ways including processing speed.
It's best to keep it as pure and innocent as possible.

6 years, 6 months ago - Alwyne Kennedy

It is possible your Lacie is failing, Maybe it just needs defragging, but if, as you say, there was a sudden change in its read/write speed, then a mechanical fail could be the issue. I would advise backing up the data on it right away as it might soon fail completely (you should back-up regularly anyway). Over the years (decades) I've had a few hard drives fail on me, and operating slowly was a first symptom each time.

As for using 30fps onto a timeline that’s 25fps, yes, can. But you will need to do things such as Interpret footage. If your 30fps has audio, you will need to make sure it remains in sync. Google and Youtube search for details.

6 years, 6 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

As Alwyne says, I'd back up that Lacie straight away (you should ALWAYS have a current backup anyway. In order to satisfy our insurers, we have to keep THREE geographically separated copies of rushes at all times!

6 years, 6 months ago - John Lubran

Not only do we keep backups we also keep all rushes seperately too. All our standard Def and 1080 HD tapes are stashed as well. I'm hoping that the mooted 4K tape format will actually manifest into our production world. A damaged tape is nearly always recoverable even a section of it is destroyed.

6 years, 6 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Good point John - perhaps if nothing else you could look at a tape backup system which will allow you to backup the clips as a data stream? Not particularly cheap, but designed for archive off offsite stuff :)

6 years, 6 months ago - John Lubran

That's right Paddy; digital tape formats are pretty much just as you describe, binary code on tape. Brilliant compression codes now allow virtually lossless formats conciderably bigger than 4K on just about any medium capable of holding code. It's the speed of transfer that has made hard disk so successful. But the slower operation of tape ought not overcome the advantage of its robustness.

6 years, 6 months ago - Frederic Casella

You may also want to look in Drobo (a great way to mix your own hard drives into a Raid array that works for your spec re speed & price) and/or GTech drives - g-technology.com - (which I find generally superior to LaCie)

6 years, 6 months ago - Ray Brady

I run seven daisy-chained thunderbolt external hard drives into my Mac. Have GTech and various others all picked up second hand. You can easily upgrade the hard drives in seconds or add SSD's. Use one of the various hard drive test like CrystalDiskMark or Disk Benchmark when you first run the drive, they work by filling up the hard drive to the max and then giving you statistical information in regard to how the hard drives are performing. If all good, a fresh format and you're ready to go. Re best hard drives. Just google "which are the most reliable hard drives", plenty of people of asked the same question before. When I last did it I got some superb links where people had generously shared their test reports, fail info and actual hard drive lifetime.
Top 10 Software to Test Hard Drive Speed - Recoverit Data Recovery
https://recoverit.wondershare.com/computer-problems/test-hard-drive-speed.html
Regards Ray
https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002916/

6 years, 6 months ago - Nadaav Soudry

I use Lacie Raid 5 big - 5x6TB drives = 30TB, at Raid 5 gives me 24TB usable space, running at about 800Mbs, means I can usually edit 4k at full spec, with no lag, depending on how many effects, streams and what codec is in use. Sometimes I have to set it to play at 50% quality, especially if I have graded the images. The drive was not cheap though - from memory it is about £1600, and it is only TB2, so I need a TB2 to TB3 adaptor. But this was the most affordable option when I purchased about 9 months ago.

6 years, 6 months ago - A Knox

I think to fine tune an answer we'd need a couple of details about your iMac. Which model year do you have, which version of OS X are you running, how much RAM you have installed. From these detail we can know which version of thunderbolt connector you have or alternatively if you have USB 3 sockets etc. From these details one can specify a suitable desktop disc array. Of example you might be able to go for a single 8Tb Fusion drive running from a desktop enclosure. When editing the load through the system will be dependent on the speed of your connections between computer and edit drive.

6 years, 6 months ago - Sue Carpenter

Thanks all for advice and info. My iMac has Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3. It's a Retina 4K, late 2015 iMac currently running on OS High Sierra V 10.13.6; processor 3.1GHz ICi5 . 16GB memory. Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 1536 MB .

I have all rushes on 2 separate WD Elements drives, one which I don't touch. I admit with this project I am then accessing one of these drives for some of the footage. Some of the footage I've copied over to the 1TB LaCie Rugged (Thunderbolt 2) and I run the Premiere CC 2019 project (along with Auto save and preview files etc) from the LaCie. I copy the Project file each day to the WD drive, so it's always in 2 places.