What is the minimum sized hard drive to do good dv editing?

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Should seek time be a certain amount? I'm know RPM must be 7200.

-- Dallas Dale (kybratcher@yahoo.com), January 07, 2002

Answers

Seek time and RPM are important, however size and data transfer rate are usually more definitive factors. For digital video editing, the consensus among most experts is that the drive should be able to transfer (at the very least) 4 MBps. Most modern hard drives (UltraATA/66 and above or Ultra/SCSI-2 and above) comply with this requirement. As for the size, the bigger the better. Taking in consideration that uncompress video on DV format will require roughly 13GB per hour of film, I wouldn't rely on anything with less than 40GB.

Also, most people agree that a dedicated hard drive is a much better approach than using the same drive that contains th O/S and applications.

Hope this helps.

-- Pedro Franco (pfranco2@earthlink.net), January 18, 2002.


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