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Scratch Disk. What is the best option?

D

DetroitRockCity

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 23, 2009
71
0
Detroit, Michigan
Hello. I am going to be buying my Mac Pro at the end of this month. I need some help on what to invest some money in. I will be editing AVCHD as well as HDV in final cut pro.

Should I go for a 1TB internal drive to be my scratch disk, or should I get a 1TB firewire 800 external drive?

Which one would be faster when editing AVCHD and/or HDV?

Thank you for your help! :)
 
internal sata gives you up to 3gb/sec transfer
external gives you about 800mb/sec transfer

make sure to get a drive through newegg.com rather than apple and save a few bucks.
 
Thank you for the advice.
Yes, I plan on buying it at newegg.
One of my friends tried telling me firewire 800 was better for digital video because it is "streaming" or something to that effect.
 
DetroitRockCity said:
Thank you for the advice.
Yes, I plan on buying it at newegg.
One of my friends tried telling me firewire 800 was better for digital video because it is "streaming" or something to that effect.
Click to expand...

Firewire externals are better for this sort of operation when compared to USB, not an internal SATA drive. SATA will be faster.
 
I don't know what you do with your scratch disc, but mine is used to write temporary files to for Photoshop and Final Cut. It would take me months to fill up 128 gigs.
As far as a STORAGE disc, then yeah, 1TB is cool.
 
If you're getting a 17" MBP with an ExpressCard/34 slot, then the fastest way is to:

  • Get a Sonnet Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 card
  • Get at least one SATA drive
  • Park the SATA drive in an external enclosure (single drive, two drive, four drive, etc. enclosure) that supports eSATA
  • Plug in the eSATA cable between the enclosure and the Sonnet card
The Sonnet card in question has dual ports and each port is good for up to 1600 Mb/sec. That'll run rings around most anything else, especially if two or more drives are involved -- and at a price point lower than large SSDs.

If no ExpressCard/34 slot then I'd generally recommend an external FW800 drive. You generally do NOT want scratch on an internal drive. I've seen people with stuff on internal drives and resulting frame drops in Final Cut until they moved scratch to external FW800 or eSATA.
 
electroshock said:
If you're getting a 17" MBP with an ExpressCard/34 slot, then the fastest way is to:

  • Get a Sonnet Tempo SATA Pro ExpressCard/34 card
  • Get at least one SATA drive
  • Park the SATA drive in an external enclosure (single drive, two drive, four drive, etc. enclosure) that supports eSATA
  • Plug in the eSATA cable between the enclosure and the Sonnet card
The Sonnet card in question has dual ports and each port is good for up to 1600 Mb/sec. That'll run rings around most anything else, especially if two or more drives are involved -- and at a price point lower than large SSDs.

If no ExpressCard/34 slot then I'd generally recommend an external FW800 drive. You generally do NOT want scratch on an internal drive. I've seen people with stuff on internal drives and resulting frame drops in Final Cut until they moved scratch to external FW800 or eSATA.
Click to expand...

I am getting a Mac Pro desktop. So why would I not want a scratch disk on an internal drive?
 
DetroitRockCity said:
I am getting a Mac Pro desktop. So why would I not want a scratch disk on an internal drive?
Click to expand...

Whoops, was thinking in context of a MBP or some such -- my bad. Yeah, on a Mac Pro, that should be fine if it's not doing double duty as something else (e.g. OS/apps/boot drive).
 
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