In our previous post about budget video system essentials, we discussed the need to have a good editing machine. Today we are going to look at the need to have Giga Bytes of storage space. The reality of working with video is that it requires large amounts of storage space. If you work with HD, you need even more. Fortunately for us, Hard Drive space is fairly inexpensive.

One point to emphasize at the beginning. You should NEVER, and I repeat NEVER have your operating system and your video storage on the same drive. This can result in alot of headaches down the road. OS hard drives are not typically fast enough to support video and you dont want a hard drive failure to cause you to loose hours of editing work. Refer to the post about setting your capture scratch for a more detailed explanation as to why you want the video storage to be seperate from your OS drive.

If you are shooting in miniDV, your footage is captured at a rate of 25MB/s.  If you are shooting with HDV, you shooting at a rate of about 35MB/s.  That translates to between 90 GB of data per hour for DV and 126 GB of data per hour for HDV.  These rates are estimates, but you get the idea.  When you begin to work with DV and HDV footage, you will quickly find yourself needing large storage drives to save your video and renders.

The other factor to consider is that you need a hard drive that can record this information at these data rates.  Hard drives come in various RPM speeds.  The cheaper the drive the slower the RPM rate.  They range from 4800 RPM to over 15,000 RPM.  For video capture and storage, you want to have a drive that operates at atleast 7,200 RPM and higher.  This rate is fast enough to prevent drop frames while digitizing and when outputing your final edit.

There are several quality companies that produce hard drives for video editing and production.  My preferences, base on personal experience and reviews, is the G-Raid and the Lacie Drives.  They both offer high RPM drives with fire-wire connectivity.  The G-TECH G-Raid 2, at the time of this post, was selling for as little as $0.35 per GB.  That is pretty inexpensive for external storage.

You can’t do alot of editing without have plenty of external hard drive storage.  When you research which drive to purchase, look for RPM speed, total capacity, and interface (firewire versus USB).  If you can get maximum speed, capacity and interface for your budget dollars, you will be able to edit effectively and efficiently.