Two hard drives

[Ted Pietrzyk]

I would like somebody to explain ,what is the idea to have two seperate hard drives, in system aiming for video editing.
Is this only to prevent loosing video files in case some drive mulfunction, or is performance issue.
I just ordered XPS 420 from Dell with 1TB hard drive. Wonder if I should consider ad second hard drive ( e.g. 350 GB )
swap operation system to this drive and use first one ( 1TB ) as storage or I'll be fine with one

[kodebuster]

Being a little paranoid, I never keep data files on the same drive where my OS resides.

Way too many times the OS would becomes inoperable, or the drive would screw up the Boot Record data, or Windows would just do it's typical weird crap that no sane person can explain and you can't see that drive or it's data.

When that happens and I need to wipe the OS drive clean, and I mean not just reinstall windows, but completely deleting all drive partitions, your screwed if your data is on this drive.

AS far as performance across mutiple drives, someone needs to convince me of that scenario...

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

If you are really thinking about a second drive, get (say) a 150Gb drive, designate it as you C: drive, copy across the opsys (Acronis or similar tools do this very well) then re-designate your original 1Tb drive as the data/video drive. Just my suggestion.

[Steve Grisetti]

Also, Ted, the reason for a second drive, dedicated to video, is more than simply to protect the data.

It has to do with all the data moving around in your computer. Particularly during capture, the data coming in from the camcorder moves to the second drive and doesn't interfere with paging and other things going on on the C drive. Likewise, your second hard drive suffers less fragmentation, which leaves lots more contiguous chunks of space for scratch disks and temp files, meaning fewer problems when your processing your video or transcoding it to DVD.

All of this used to mean a lot more when people were editing with Pentium 4's with 2 ghz or less of processing power. Back then, you had to shut down all your background processing and antivirus just to capture, and adding a second hard drive could mean all the difference between a smooth editing experience and constant struggle to squeeze enough power out of your system to make it all work.

These days, even with a 3 ghz Pentium 4 and 1 gig of RAM, I can capture without even disconnecting from the internet or turning off my e-mail. The boost you get from adding a second drive isn't quite as noticeable as it was, but it can still smooth out the wrinkles nicely.

[JohnnyO]

It's always a good idea to have a second drive for backup purposes.

[Jayell]

Also, Ted, the reason for a second drive, dedicated to video, is more than simply to protect the data.
It has to do with all the data moving around in your computer. Particularly during capture, the data coming in from the camcorder moves to the second drive and doesn't interfere with paging and other things going on on the C drive. Likewise, your second hard drive suffers less fragmentation, which leaves lots more contiguous chunks of space for scratch disks and temp files, meaning fewer problems when your processing your video or transcoding it to DVD.

Thanks, Steve. This was a good reminder. I have two external drives for video and backups .. I just couldn't remember why