What is the min transfer rate for HDDs for Capture and Edit?

[cdrov]

Hello, I was wondering what is the minimum limit on HDDs transfer rate so as Edius will capture without dropped frames and edit flawlessly.

What happens if the transfer rate of the HDD that contains the footage is not enough for edius and at that time procoder is transcoding the mpeg file? Will is have missing frames or jerky movement? Has anybody tried the ethernet drives like my book world edition (it has a Gbit ethernet connection)? Thank you

[STORMDAVE]

This is a broad question because we need to know what are you editing? DV/HDV(MPEG2 TS) ? Canopus HQ SD/HD? Uncompressed SD/HD?

If DV, any drive will do...most of the newer 500GB-750GB SATAII drives can do about 70MB/sec write on a semi-empty drive without an issue.

You should have zero issues if you want to do Canopus HQ (HD) or DV via Gigabit ethernet. It all depends on how much speed your drives are capable of doing, though.

Are you planning on sharing your files on a file server between different computers?

As for MPEG2 encoding, the speed does matter, but don't worry about jerkiness in the final output if your drives can't keep up (I can't imagine why, though) Edius just encodes to MPEG2 as fast as your computer can.

[cdrov]

Thanks, i am editing mostly DV and now i am entering the HDV. For this reason i have recenlty acquired an HP nx 9420 laptop with 2GB ram, ATI X1600 but only 160GB 5400 HDD. Using HDtach i see that the transfer rate is at most 30MB/sec. For this reason i am turned into external drives (bught until now 4 different but not as pleased as i would like to be). I got a PCMCIA card that gives out 2 sata I ports (not raid capable since the pcmcia of nx does not support it) and installed 2 Seagate 250GB HDDs. The result unfortunately only 20MB / sec which is the same with 2 external usb drives i have tried. So i was wondering what happens when edius works with the 20MBs / sec i have? Will it capture? edit? and export to Mpeg? without dropped frames or jerky movements?
Has anyone tried ethernet drives? Theoretically 1Gbit/8=125MB/sec but i do not bevieve it will evere achieved?

[STORMDAVE]

Hey there, it looks like your laptop is pretty recent...so if you got an eSATA adapter for your PC Card Slot, then theoretically you should get some fast speeds on an eSATA enclosure or a RAID0 or RAID 1 (Mirrored) enclosure with 2 drives in an external box. Something's not right. Even at 20MB/sec you're fine with a single Canopus HQ (If you opt to use it) stream which is roughly 13MB/sec per stream. If you do DV it is 3.6MB/sec and so is HDV (Very hard on your computers processor).

With USB2.0 you should be getting a good 26-28MB/sec if the bus is not shared, but with an eSATA (Your best bet) connection you should get really fast speeds.

Is this simialr to what you bought for your laptop?

http://www.satacard.com/pc112.html

[Rusty]

SD,

How does eSATA compare with 1394b (for Edius)?

Rusty

[cdrov]

Thanks SD. By the way that was exactly the card i have taken. Despite that 9420 did not like it and never recognised it. So i got a STLabs Sata I card which give the speeds i was telling you about. As far as 1394b i have to say hat having tested on a friend machine it is pretty good. Unfoortunately he does not do video editing to tell us about stability. Of course since 1394a is better than USb 2 then of course we expect 1394b with 800Mbits to be better. But the question is ethernet or 1394b - 1000Mbit vs 800Mbits. Despite that i found on the net a review on WD Myworld edition external drive that despite the theoriticall transfer rate in reality it does not give more thatn 10MB's average.

[GrassValley_BH]

Just remember that 1394 is repeater technology, meaning that the bus will slow down to the slowest device.

[Zorro]

DV is about 3.5MB/sec. This means that you can't buy a new harddisk which would be too slow. Just be sure that the harddisk runs in udma mode and that neither the cable or controller ist broken.