Video editing storage set up query

[BecomingPizza]

I'm looking to get some new storage but am a bit perplexed by the options on the market at the moment, and which would be best suited to my situation. So I figure who better to ask than those helpful, knowledgeable people on the OCUK Forums!

Basically, I do a lot of video editing of game footage from 2 sources, and I'm pretty sure my old HDDs are slowing me down during rendering, and they are definitely in capacity.

I initially thought I'd just pick up an SSD and record to that, but given the size-price I'd end up needing to spend upwards of £600 to have the minimum capacity I need just to store the backlog (1Tb I reckon, our play sessions can go on for a looooong time ) so it seems a bit overkill.

Then I thought about having a large HDD for recording to, then moving bits to an SSD as a I wanted to render them, but I think that the time spent moving stuff would negate any time saved during rendering.

Then theres SSD caching which I'm thinking may not be of any benefit to me but I am really not sure!

And just to throw this into the mix, currently the method of moving footage to my PC from my flatmate's (he's the guy I do the vids with) is via an external hard drive of some kind which claims to be USB 3.0 compatible but looking in HD Tune its averaging around 60MB/s which seems slow to me (think its just a cheap hard drive). So what I was thinking of was maybe picking up 2 pretty quick hard drives and getting them set up so I could hot swap one of them, thus saving a lot of transfer time (and meaning he never gets a Christmas present from me again ever lol).

Oh and budget wise (although I'm mainly after recommendations as to the setup) I'd like not to go over £300 but could maybe push it a little.

I may be asking for the impossible on a budget like this, but hopefully someone out there has been in a similar predicament and can help me out. Thanks in advance!

 

[Shad]

For that quantity of data I don't think SSD is economically viable. For the budget I'd look at a pair of fast single platter 1Tb drives in RAID0 (should see you ~350MB/s with a decent controller) with a separate 2-3Tb drive for backup and archival. Maybe throw in some cloud backup too for good measure.

That said, generally HDDs aren't going to hold you back during rendering unless they're really old an slow. Seeking through footage during editing, different story.

 

[AbsenceJam]

As Shad says your drives are unlikely to be a bottleneck for rendering, that's all on your CPU/GPU. You'd be wise to have separate source and destination disks and maybe an SSD for scratch though. All really depends on the software setup and what you're actually doing though. The bitrate of the files you're importing, how many you're working on, what you're actually doing to the video (how much can stay in RAM, how often is the scratch disk used).
If your only complaint is slow final render then spending money on disks won't help.

60MB/s USB 3 is very slow, I can't think what drives inside what perform so badly even if it's a 5400rpm 2.5" disk. If you buy fast drives and your own caddies you'll get something quick, as fast as the drives can go.

 

[BecomingPizza]

Thanks for the replies! I guess it was daft of me not to be more specific about my current setup, what programs I use etc.
I record using fraps at 1080p 40fps, files are generally ~ 4gb for 2 minutes or so of footage. When editing I use windows movie maker (may invest in something better in the future but for now its fine) and it's generally just chopping up & stitching together shots from 2 different perspectives, some text overlay nothing major. I end up having around 20-30 files (80-120gb) to draw from for rendering each finished video, some being on my 500gb samsung drive which averages around 80MB/s read, and some being on an external hard drive averaging around 60MB/s. Bitrate I'm outputting at is 24000kbps (WMM default I think).

Some rough maths:
100gb (avg total size) / 70MB/s (avg transfer assuming equal usage) = ~ 24 minutes. That's pretty much how long its taking to render, which is why I thought my current disks were bottlenecking

For that quantity of data I don't think SSD is economically viable. For the budget I'd look at a pair of fast single platter 1Tb drives in RAID0 (should see you ~350MB/s with a decent controller) with a separate 2-3Tb drive for backup and archival. Maybe throw in some cloud backup too for good measure..

Sounds good to me, although I'd skip the cloud backup, my upload speed is appalling

60MB/s USB 3 is very slow, I can't think what drives inside what perform so badly even if it's a 5400rpm 2.5" disk. If you buy fast drives and your own caddies you'll get something quick, as fast as the drives can go.

I have no idea either, and I probably shouldn't take it apart to look at the drive, don't think my flatmate would appreciate that! But yes a new hard drive in its own caddy sounds good, I'll look into some caddies, see what I can find.

 

[wazza300]

A big 2tb and a small cheap 60gb ssd and use caching mode,it would be the cheapest/fastest way imo,you could go down the raid route for the hdd's but you stand more of a risk of losing your data should things go wrong