Are faster boot disks or scratch disks better when video editing?

[spinnerlys]

If you have two devices with FW800 speed and one device with FW400 speed, all the other FW800 devices work with the lower FW400 speed.
As FW400 means a theoretical data rate of 400Mbit/s (50MByte/s) and a practical speed of about 35MByte/s you will be more than safe capturing or playing DV encoded video, as it only needs 3.125MByte/s (25Mbit/s) to work.

 

[midge50]

Just a piece of advice, never ever use your internal Hard Drive as a scratch disk. Its a great way to shred your drive.

Just invest in a good Firewire 800 7200RPM external drive (3.5in)

I edited a huge 150gb HDV project off a Firewire 800 drive and it did fine scrubbing through hours of source material. Just make sure you have plenty of RAM allocated.

recent convert to MAC. Have been doing fair editing on a an old PC product for years that worked great. Anyway, no doing FCE 4 and have now read multiple postings about not using my internal hard drive for scratch disk (which I never heard of either). got me a FW800 7200 external so that will help.

Any good source to fully understand setting up scratch disk and the comment about RAM allocated? I hate waiting for renders. And, the best formats to edit video in - high end quality is not that important.

 

[spice weasel]

Thanks for the graphic Spinnerlys. I will give that a try. I had read in one of the other forums that people had problems daisychaining, and it would slow down my interface to the firewire 400 speed, but that's still fast enough for DV right?

Thanks,

Ryan

I'm not 100% certain, but I think that if you put your FW400 device at the end of the chain, you'll get the FW800 transfer rates on all other drives except the last one.