Hard Drive Workflow Advice

Hello there,

I'm using a 21.5 inch mid-2011 IMac (2.7 GHz Intel Core i5) which I've upgraded to 16gb of memory.

So...I want to continue to squeeze as much performance from my comp as possible by using the correct external hard drives in the best way...I've not got the funds to get a new comp at the moment.

I've been advised to use a fast external drive as a working drive, another one as a cache and then to use simpler ones as just back ups...Working on this assumption , what would people as a fast working drive and a cache drive? I can't work out whether firewire 7200rpm is better than Thunderbolt 5400 rpm etc etc...

I'd really appreciate some advice on this. My comp actually is still working OK, and I believe something along these lines would help.

Many thanks,
Jack

Hi Jacky
Firewire I/O is ~ 80MB/s so is the slowest. Doesn't matter what drive you have connected, all modern drives will saturate the I/O bus and it is the port itself that is the bottleneck.
A TB1 port is good for up to 5Gb/s (same as USB 3) TB2 can reach 20Gb/s
A 5400rpm hdd will give you about 100-120MB/s depending on chipsets and age of drive.
A modern 7200rpm hdd will give you ~ 160-180MB/s
A ssd drive will give you ~400-500MB/s
All of these are maximum sequential read/writes on drives that have plenty of free space, at least 15-25%.
Small blocks of data will transfer at only a fraction of sequential large blocks of data.
Read speeds will be faster than write speeds.
How fast of a drive and I/O port you need is really related to what type of media you are editing. If you are only editing single streams of SD or even HD(1080p) clips, then any drive will work. If you do multiple streams (multiple cams/lots of effects) then go for the fastest drive you can afford.
Ram and processor speeds mostly come into the equation with heavy use and high resolution clips.
Hope this helps, Greg

Hi Greg,

Many thanks for this. Just to be clear, you're saying firewire is slow even if it's a 7200 rpm drive with a firewire port?

So would you recommend a Thunder Bolt 5400 rpm external hardrive (such as the LaCie Rugged ones? (unless I'm blind to them, I can't seem to see any 7200 rpm Thunder Bolt Ex Hard drives?)

I often edit things with multi-cams, all HD, but also just about to edit some RD3 files from a Red.

Yes, Firewire is slower than T'bolt no matter what drive you use.
Ultimate speed would be a T'bolt RAID with 7200rpm drives.
I'd not spend money on a T'bolt drive of any configuration unless it is SSD or 7200rpm. I'd avoid 5200rpm drives like the plague for video editing.

OK Great.

Any particular ones you'd recommend?

Hi Jack
Any modern drive will saturate a FW port, meaning no matter what the drive is, the drive is capable of being faster than the I/O port itself. Each port has data transfer speeds that is separate from whatever device is connected to it. In this case it is the FW800 protocol (chipset) that cannot go as fast as the drives. This is true no matter what speed 5400rpm or 7200rpm the drive spins at, or even if it is a ssd drive.
I'll slightly disagree with Ben, modern 5400rpm drives can handle HD footage, but why bother and not get faster 7200rpm drives that are about 50% faster for ~ same $$$?
If you are using only a single drive, either spinning or solid state, then USB3 will be just as fast as TB. It is the drives themselves that is the bottleneck (slowest component). You need several ssd drives to exceed the speed of either USB3 or TB. So if you are planning to use a RAID 0, with 3 or more ssd drives, then you will need a TB enclosure. The TB port on early Macs is both TB1 and USB3, so you could save some money if only using 1 drive and go with USB3.
Just to complicate matters a little bit, you can attach 2 USB3 drives to computer and use a software RAID 0 to ~ double I/O speeds.
If you plan on using say 4K red files (especially if multi-cam or lots of effects), you are starting to push both the I/O bus on your iMac and the i5 CPU/GPU of your current computer. You may find it necessary to use Proxy files to edit and then render out with full resolution. Rendering may be slow, but editing in Proxy should be okay. In this case I would recommend ssd drives.

Hope this helps, Greg

Hi Greg,

I'm using an older mac so it doesn't have USB 3.0 . Just 2.0, Firewire and Thunderbolt.

Could you recommend a 72000 rpm Thunderbolt external drive?

Any thoughts on the LaCie 2 big 12 terabyte RAID Drive (thunderbolt?)

Hey Jacky
Me bad, thought you had the iMac that the TB1 port also supported USB3. Seems that didn't start until 2012. Do not use the USB2 ports, especially for RED files for media drives. USB2 is actually slower than FW800.
By all means use TB1 (me bad again, TB1 = 10Gb/s (~1300MB/s) not 5Gb/s(650MB/s)) USB3 = 5Gb/s; USB3.1 gen2 = 10Gb/s
So the TB1 port on your iMac will handle about 3 ssds in RAID 0 or around 8 hdds (7200rpm) in RAID 0 before saturating the bus.
Haven't used that particular LaCie drive, but I have had fairly good luck with LaCie products in the past. I think LaCie is now owned by Seagate and that will be the brand of drives in the units.

Don't forget to get back-up drives (2or3). They can be any type of drive even USB2 or FW, just slow transfer. RAIDs are not considered back-up drives in and of themselves. Always best to have a least a couple of BUs. Personally I tend to use HGST or Western Digital (Reds and Black)drives for spinning hdds. I buy bare drives, then stick them in 2 bay docks or external enclosures. The bay docks (USB3.1) allows me to swap out the back-up drives easily, and I rotate my back-ups.

Hope this helps, Greg