Re: External Hard drive recommendations Windows Laptop

SSDs (Solid State Drives), are going to give you your fastest response time without spending the money for a 10k rpm typical hard drive, but as you probably already know, SSDs aren't cheap.

RAID is great to have for data protection (after all, what a RAID set up is doing is saving your data to multiple places at once). I've run without any RAID arrays for years, but am also overly cautious about insuring I have multiple back ups -- in different geographic locations -- of my current working files. Then I offload data onto archive drives.

Down to what you're really asking, however, given the system configuration you're talking about, even if you go with a 7200rpm standard External Hard Drive set up (iOmega, Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, or others), spending the extra money on an SSD or 10k drive is not going to really buy you that much extra time in the editing. What's really doing the heavy lifting is your CPU and GPU. An i7 processor will do fine. With only 8GB RAM, and a GPU not optimized for the Mercury playback, make sure you shut down all of the other apps when you go to render. You may even want to get an app that shuts down all of the unnecessary background applications.

I recently built a new machine with a i7 processor, 24 GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 4 series GPU, a 256GB SSD boot drive, and a 10k rpm data drive. I have three other data drives migrated from my last machine tied in. I do notice a difference between the 10k and 7200rpm drives when accessing video files, but we're talking about a 5% difference in processing time versus the close to 500% gain in reduced processing time by now leveraging a faster GPU. The difference has been that dramatic. In many cases, even when layering a lot of effects onto the footage, rendering happens in practically real-time even with heavy compression. (i.e. 30 minute sequence takes 30 minutes to render / export.)

But back to the drives, I've personally had a lot of great luck with much of the Western Digital line of products, and even used a Maxtor drive in the same scenario that you're discussing.

Sorry if you already know all of this, and if I've just been blathering.