I'm taking a trip overseas and wanted to combine Final Cut Pro media files from my 500GB and 400GB external firewire hard drives onto 2 partitions on my 1TB drive, in order to save luggage space. Will this create problems while editing in FCP? I'm not sure how many drive read heads a 1TB hard drive has, and whether this is risky for data.
A related question is if I'm using external firewire Hard drives 1 and 2 to create a new video file with compressor, will saving the file on Hard drive 3 increase performance speed? Meaning, while Hard drive 1 reads from it's platter, doesn't that slow down write performance on that drive?
Re: 2 HD Partitions on 1 HD by David Roth Weiss on Jul 2, 2008 at 2:24:58 am
Alexander,
Separate partitions are not like separate hard drives. In fact, there is little or no difference whatsoever in creating separate partitions on a drive as a virtual system drive and virtual media drive, from simply slinging everything together on one partition.
[Alexander Lee]"A related question is if I'm using external firewire Hard drives 1 and 2 to create a new video file with compressor, will saving the file on Hard drive 3 increase performance speed? Meaning, while Hard drive 1 reads from it's platter, doesn't that slow down write performance on that drive?"
You're overthinking this stuff. Buffers and RAM more than make up the difference.
David Roth Weiss
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Re: 2 HD Partitions on 1 HD by gary adcock on Jul 3, 2008 at 12:26:19 am
[Alexander Lee]" if I'm using external firewire Hard drives 1 and 2 to create a new video file with compressor, will saving the file on Hard drive 3 increase performance speed?"
Alexander
that is a correct assumption if we are discussing different physical drives.
However - if we are talking partitions of a single physical drive- reading and writing from multiple partitions on that single unit are actually as much as 20% slower than if you just wrote to 1 physical drive.
The reason for this is that you would need to be reading and writing the directory as well as the media to multiple places at the same time, not something that is possible with a partitioned drive since there is only one read /write head - no matter how many partitions.
Whereas multiple physical drive enclosures have multiple read write heads, allowing for better performance overall since it is not possible for low cost FW drives to be able to read and write at the same time.
gary adcock
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