Does the Amount of Hard Drives Affect Snappy Editing?

[User]

I'm editing a documentary. I picked up some new 1080p material and I need to make some space for it in the external Lacie Thunderbolt 5 bay. The drives are not in a RAID configuration. JBOD. 2013 MacBook Pro 16GB. PPro CC 8.2.0
Now suppose, to make space, I combined footage from two 2TB drives onto one 4TB drive. Can anyone comment on the speed and performance of editing when material is spread out over more drive vs. less drives? In other words, will I have a more snappy editing experience with material spread out over more drives (more heads riding the platters) rather than piling it up onto fewer bigger drives? Is the difference negligible or is there something to this?

[User]

37 views and no opinions? Alrighty then.
I'll move forward by putting the the two 2TB on the one 4TB and see if I notice difference in performance. I imagine pro editors know the deal.

[AaronChicago]

Adding more drives in a RAID configuration will help. I don't think it matters otherwise. What I usually do is keep a storage drive (4TB) , an edit drive (1TB SSD), and a system drive (for programs). When I'm editing a project I'll use the 1TB SSD. Once the project is totally finish I'll back everything up to an external hard drive. If a project is on hold I'll move it back over to the 4TB storage drive did I'm editing it again.

[Dave Maze]

So sorry but "effect" not "affect" 

[User]

Right on Aaron. Thanks for jumping in. Good to hear that you don't think it matters much by dumping the 2 drives onto a bigger one.

And your logic in splitting up the drives to perform different tasks makes sense as I've heard this before.

Questions:
A) When you say 'edit drive' do you mean a drive that holds your current moment by moment work?
B) Where do you have your editing program writing it's cache etc files to? The 1TB SSD drive for system and programs? I ask this because in Premier Pro, the Media Cache folder defaults to the system drive and can grow to huge sizes taking up space. My plan is to placing Premier Pro's Media Cache folder on an external drive like the 'edit drive.' Though maybe it should be on another drive so read/ write is not in in competition?

 

3 minutes ago, DaveAltizer said:

So sorry but "effect" not "affect" 

I guess I'm a little 'affected' by years of no sleep

[Andy Zou]

I have a 2TB RAID0 array for active project data, a 1TB for archive, a 100gbSSD for scratch/cache, anotehr 100GB SSD for OS/Programs, an old dying HD for torrenting and temp files.

The RAID0 array reads and writes faster than the single hard drive, but at the cost of doubling the catastrophic failure chance.  This can easily be measured with benchmark tests, I can't remember what I use but it literally measures the Mb/s of transferring a test file.

That being said, it'll only help if your editing is being bottlenecked by the HDDs.  What's the bitrate of your footage?  Are you multi-camming?  How much data does the system need to be able to randomly access?  And what bitrates are you writing?  You should have it reading from one drive and writing to another to keep those lanes open, so to say.  

[User]

Hi Andy, thanks for your comments.

Footage is mix of 1080p flavours. XDCam 35Mbps, h.264 50Mbps, ProRes 422 147Mbps.
System: 2013 MacBook Pro 16GB. PPro CC 8.2.0. Lacie Thunderbolt 5 bay. The drives are not in a RAID configuration. JBOD.
I'm only editing while using effects, grading. Nothing over the top. Sorry I don't know the writing bitrates. 
I've been on this system for 2.5 years and it mostly runs flawlessly... except for the Mercury Engine thingy.

My original question was to get a sense from others how they configure to make the most of their editing experience.

[sandro]

I don't think hdds configuration makes that much of difference. Yes you can get less jumps between different clips if positioned distant on the HDD because it needs to seek on the platters. SSD removes that problem. BUT I don't think you will humanly notice any difference. For these applications where the CPU is always the limit hdd speed is negligible considerand that most reach 100MB/s at least.

[AaronChicago]

1 hour ago, User said:

Right on Aaron. Thanks for jumping in. Good to hear that you don't think it matters much by dumping the 2 drives onto a bigger one.

And your logic in splitting up the drives to perform different tasks makes sense as I've heard this before.

Questions:
A) When you say 'edit drive' do you mean a drive that holds your current moment by moment work?
B) Where do you have your editing program writing it's cache etc files to? The 1TB SSD drive for system and programs? I ask this because in Premier Pro, the Media Cache folder defaults to the system drive and can grow to huge sizes taking up space. My plan is to placing Premier Pro's Media Cache folder on an external drive like the 'edit drive.' Though maybe it should be on another drive so read/ write is not in in competition?

 

 

Yes the edit drive is when I'm working on a specific project, I'll import the footage into that drive and create a PP project.

Cache files, I set up a cache folder on my 4TB storage drive.

My programs drive is a whole different drive. It's a 500GB SSD.