External Hard Drive Quandry

[sidd finch]

I am hoping someone has an insight to the following:

This is the time of year I stock up on external Hard Drives to be used for my video storage needs. In the past I have been using USB 2.0 7200 rpm drives which work out well. I am slowly trying to transition over to USB 3.0 to replace my 2.0 drives.

My question is regarding RPM speed. I have one USB 3.0 external case that I placed a 1TB 5400 RPM drive into and the performance was not bad. Is a USB 3.0 5400 RPM external drive adequate. 80% is video file storage but I do occasionally export video from PPRO to external drives.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Sidd

[Gerlinde]

I do occasionally export video from PPRO to external drives.

I would think it should be ok. The encoding process is done on your internal hdd and it is only writing to the external drive.

[Bob]

Sidd,

Don't worry about upgrading your HDDs from SATA II to SATA III. Even SATA I can handle the typical top sustained speed of a HDD -- it can impact burst speeds though. SATA II is more than adequate to handle your mechanical drives and can easily handle any speed a HDD can muster. SATA III is useful for faster devices such as SSDs that can take advantage of the faster potential transfer rates.

For most HDD configurations, RPM is more important than the interface. But, how you are going to be using the disk matters as much. Modern HDD drives using Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) have a much higher data density than older drives using Longitudinal Recording. Your sustained read/write speeds are going to be similar. As a result, If you are going to be using the drive mainly as a storage drive, a 5400 rpm drive is entirely adequate. Seek times will be slower than with a faster rpm drive, but that's mainly a concern when you will be using the drive for things where fast random access matters. Think executable program files, databases, work files, scratch files, project files and source files etc.. For those types of application, you definitely want 7200 rpm or faster.

[sidd finch]

Thank you Gerlinde & Bob. As always I really appreciate your insight.

Sidd