Hard Drivin'

Charles Fulton
April 2004

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What do you do when you need more storage in a hurry, but are either reluctant to open your computer and install a new drive or need the ability to move your files to another computer? The easiest way, by far, is to connect an external hard drive to your computer. There are a wide array of drives on the market and a striking number of them are video-ready. Let's investigate the features that you need to look for when selecting a drive for video.

A hard drive's capacity determines the amount of data (and thus the amount of video) that you can store on it. 20-40GB drives are entry-level drives for video, but they are inexpensive and reasonably easy to come by. 80-120GB drives may well be the most mainstream and are not much more expensive than most entry-level drives. Staggeringly large drives (i.e. 200GB or larger) are out there, but they can be rather pricey. If you need to store a lot of video, these are the drives you want. Besides, calculate the price per GB and the larger drives are often the best deal.

Admittedly not quite as relevant a figure as it once was (thanks at least in part to the increasingly high densities found on today's hard drives), spindle speed is still an important consideration. We'd recommend 7,200 rpm drives for DV video. Drives with higher spindle speeds tend to have faster seek times and can deliver higher throughput rates. However, reliability becomes a concern with extremely high spindle speeds (e.g. 10,000 or even 15,000 rpm) generating more heat and more head movement. Ultimately, this means more wear on the mechanism. 15,000-rpm drives are not necessary for DV production work and are actually designed primarily for server applications anyhow. In any case, don't forget to make regular backups of your important files.

Sustained transfer rate is one of the more important characteristics to consider when purchasing a hard drive for video needs. The sustained data transfer rate refers to the speed at which data can be continuously moved onto or off of the hard drive (in contrast to the burst transfer rate, which is meaningless for large video files). Generally speaking, almost all USB 2.0 and FireWire drives can move data fast enough to handle DV, but more speed is better, providing a margin of safety that will help to ensure that no frames will be dropped when dealing with video in real time.

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