Possibly the number one hard drive chosen by professional video editors is the RAID hard drive. RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a unique type of hard drive that provides "redundancy." This means that it duplicates critical parts of your hard drive thereby increasing its dependability and functionality. If your hard drive should fail for some reason, multiple drives in a RAID can add redundancy, making data loss or system failure less likely. RAID drives can also give your system that extra kick it will need when you are using it for video editing and video storage. For these reasons, RAID hard drives are popular among video editing professionals and a top choice of video editors when shopping for a hard drive for their media storage systems.

Internal or External?

If you have the space inside your computer tower, an internal hard drive is probably the easiest and best solution when adding an additional hard drive to your media storage system. Internal drives can be purchased at electronic specialty stores or online. There are many internal hard drives on the market, among them are the Seagate Barracuda XT with 2TB. This high-capacity hard drive is very useful for video editing because it is built on a full-speed 7200 rpm 4-disk platform. It has a sustained data transfer rate of 138MB/s, with a huge 64MB cache, SATA 6GB/s interface. The Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB internal hard drive has a rotational speed of 7200, transfer rates of 126MB/s and a SATA 6GB/s interface. The Samsung SpinPoint F3R Enterprise Class 1TB internal hard drive has a rotational speed of 7200 as well and 300MB/s. It uses two 500GB platter disks, for a total of 1TB.

However, if you don't have room in your system tower, you can always opt for an external hard drive, which is also usually a lot more convenient than internal hard drives because external hard drives can be connected to just about any PC or Mac. You can also do your video editing from anywhere - simply take the drive along with you. In addition, as your media storage system and your needs grow, you can buy more external hard drives that you can connect together so your media storage system will never be low on storage space. Some popular external hard drives are the Western Digital My Book AV 1TB external hard drive, which includes a USB 2.0 and eSATA host interface, an external data transfer rate of 480Mbps, and a data transfer rate of up to 3GB/s.

The Hitachi XL3000 desktop hard drive, 3TB, has a USB 2.0 interface with a transfer rate of 480Mbps, and the G-Technology G-DRIVE 2TB external hard drive comes loaded with the power of a 7200 rpm, IEEE 1394b (FireWire 800), and a high speed USB/eSATA interface type.

HDD or SSD

Until recently, traditional Hard Disk Drives, or HDDs were the only type of hard drive, besides the RAID hard drive, that video editing professionals had to choose from. These electromechanical drives are partly constructed of spinning disks and movable read/write heads. HDDs run on high-speed serial interfaces, such as the standard SATA or SCSI, which operates at a faster speed.

Solid-State Drives, or SSDs, are hard drives much like HDDs in that their main function is to store data. The main advantage of SSDs over HDDs is that they use solid-state memory to store data, and yet they provide access to data in much the same way as traditional HDDs. They are different from HDDs in that they use microchips to retain data, and unlike traditional HDDs, they contain no movable parts, making them capable of withstanding shock much better than traditional hard disk drives. They are also much quieter and have a lower access time and latency. However, they are also much more expensive than standard HDDs.

Solid state drive's read/write speeds are also significantly faster than the standard hard drive speeds. Among the many solid state hard drives in the market today is the Intel SSD 320 Series, which comes in a variety of sizes. It offers a 3-Gb/s SATA, and up to 39,500 input/output operations per second (IOPS) random reads and 23,000 IOPS random writes. The Corsair Force Series 3 60GB has a SATA 3 6GB/s interface and quick read/write times when installed in PCs using the latest SATA 3 6GB/s interface. And the Seagate Momentus XT 500 GB solid state drive has 7200 rpm, SATA 3GB/s, and 32MB Cache.