is editing with an internal drive hard on the drive?

Mac Retard

WTF? How does that make sense? The fastest hard drive your system has access to is the internal drive. Why bother with an external drive when you have enough space for video editing. Only use external drives as a quick backup solution. USB and firewire are slower than SATA2.

Use your internal drive, hard drives fail nomatter if you use them or not, so use what you got until it blows up. Only use an external hard drive as a quick and temporary backup solution. Make sure you back up your data in a final format using CD roms or DVDs.

It's obvious to me that this Mac "genius" you talked to is in reality a retard and doesn't care about anything more than selling you something else.

fuzorsilverbolt said:

WTF? How does that make sense? The fastest hard drive your system has access to is the internal drive.

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WTF??? Have you ever imagined that when you use the internal drive it would need to read and write at the same time? And that when you have an external scratch disk it would only be used for writing, consequently making your rendering faster?

And using your internal drive constantly for rendering large video files would eventually bring a faster death to it. So using an external drive is a good idea just because of this.

It's obvious to me that this Mac "genius" you talked to is in reality a retard and doesn't care about anything more than selling you something else.

Click to expand...

To the OP: Yes, it is recommended that you use an external disk as your scratch one.
If you only do the eventual video it won't matter much, but if you work daily with FCE, then having an external is a must.

Preferably buy a disk with firewire, it is slightly faster.

Edit to External

For the last 10 years I've been editing on Avid systems and for the last 3 I've been Final Cut and Avid. I can tell you from expereience that it's much safer to digitize to another drive, if the OS drive fails your media is safe, it's also not taxing the internal OS drive by reading the drive too much. I just set up a new Avid system and it automatically locked out the OS drive as a capture drive.

The best scenario I can give would be that if an internal drive fails you can carry the external drive to another computer and be up and running in under 10 minutes. In the corp. world the IT dept can install a new drive, OS apps etc then move right back in.

Article From Apple's site backing this theory....

The disk that contains your computer’s operating system is called the startup disk or boot disk. In addition to the operating system, the startup disk also stores your applications (such as Final Cut Pro), your application preferences, system settings, and documents. Because the files on the startup disk are your most critical data, maintaining the startup disk is vital.

Because digital media (especially high data rate video) makes your disks work harder, you should use dedicated disks for capturing and playing back your digital video and other media files. Consider your media disks as storage units that work long, hard hours, while your startup disk keeps your system properly organized. If a disk is going to malfunction, it’s better if your critical data is separate from your replaceable media files.

Listen to the Mac Genius and the other posters on this thread..... save for the guy that is using the word "retard", we get what he is saying, but he isn't entirely correct.

The internal drive is more than strong enough and won't get worked to hard if you are doing minor edits and by minor I mean heavy use of iMovie.

If you are doing anything more than that, i.e. heavy use of FCE or FCP2, Avid, Media 100, etc.... then grab an external disk. It will make your life and Mac use a lot easier.

what computer do you have? That Mac Genius is half right...

You should never edit videos that are on your SYSTEM drive. You want to have the OS and all media on different drives (not just separate partitions). If you have a Mac Pro/Powermac, you can have the OS on one internal and your media on another.

Digital Skunk is right, too. If your just doing a simple cut in iMovie, I wouldn't worry about it too much. If you doing stuff with anything more advanced, then get a FW external.