Resolved partition scratch drive?

[islanders]

I was thinking of partitioning a scratch drive and use one partition as scratch and the other for back up. Good idea? I might want to hold off on a Raid 1 until T-bolt is available or an adapter for eSata.

 

[islanders]

Is anyone using partitions for their external drives? It would open up options to have the scratch drive partitioned and anther output drive partitioned, one for the output and one for TimeMachine. Is anyone using partitions for their external drives?

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[jnash]

What value does a scratch drive really give us? I maybe should do a little research but I do a little video editing here and there and was wondering what are some of the big advantages of having a scratch drive?

 

[Erendiox]

What value does a scratch drive really give us? I maybe should do a little research but I do a little video editing here and there and was wondering what are some of the big advantages of having a scratch drive?

Well, first of all you NEED a scratch disk. It is the location where all your temporary files are written, waveforms, render files, all sorts of cache files, etc. By default it is your internal drive. The advantage of having an external drive as your scratch disk is that it takes pressure off your internal drive, which is already handling whatever OS and programs you've got running. This improves performance. A fast external drive is also generally a pre-requisite for streaming multiple video tracks (ie. multicamera editing), or for high bitrate video (ie. uncompressed) etc.

 

[Sylonien]

Would you still need a separate (internal or external) scratch disk if you have SSD has the only drive?

Got iMac 2011 with Apple SSD and was wondering whether it would make it much faster with another external SSD (when Thunderbolt enclosure's are available), like the Lacie Little Big Disk.

The Pegasus R series is out of my budget.

 

[Erendiox]

An SSD is much better at handling both the application and streaming media. If you have to, you'll probably be ok doing that. I would still recommend a fast external drive via FW800/Thunderbolt though.

Also keep in mind that having fast drives only helps so much. It will prevent you from dropping frames during playback and will allow you to stream multiple tracks of video, again without dropping frames. It will not improve render times or anything like that.

 

[islanders]

That's strange that no one responded to the original post yet responded to a secondary post? At any rate I've found my answer. Thanks anyway.

 

[VanMac]

That's strange that no one responded to the original post yet responded to a secondary post? At any rate I've found my answer. Thanks anyway.

So, what did you do?

 

[nateo200]

Well, first of all you NEED a scratch disk. It is the location where all your temporary files are written, waveforms, render files, all sorts of cache files, etc. By default it is your internal drive. The advantage of having an external drive as your scratch disk is that it takes pressure off your internal drive, which is already handling whatever OS and programs you've got running. This improves performance. A fast external drive is also generally a pre-requisite for streaming multiple video tracks (ie. multicamera editing), or for high bitrate video (ie. uncompressed) etc.

Agreed 100%. Any DSLR video is going to have a moderately high bit rate...45mbps for 30p 1080 and even more when the frame rate goes up...I use a 160GB stripped RAID hooked via dual USB and it provides double the data rate of just one USB drive...transcoding is less painful this way! Also if you use your internal drive...don't be surprised when you get a "low disk space" pop up in <5 minutes! But don't use a partition of a drive that is doing major OS work...you could actually slow it down..I use either my 160 stripped raid or my 2nd HDD which is internal and replaces my SuperDrive.