Video Storage

For working with video clips:

Rule 1: Do the right calculations

DV footage requires roughly 13 GB per hour. Bear in mind that it's not per hour of finished video. Allow for all the footage that you are going to trim. Your mileage may vary depending on how much of unused footage you will have.

Rule 2: Leave amply free space on your hard disk. 

Apart from the fact that Windows creates a swap file and needs space on the disk for millions of temporary files, you'll find that if you go past the 50% mark your hard disk starts to slow down.

Rule 3: Speed Matters

SCSI hard disks are fastest but ONLY if you go for the top ones. You'll find that IDE and SATA disks can match and often outperform SCSI disks. Configure your hard disks as RAID 0 for additional performance. It's sustained data transfer speeds that are important. Read our choosing hard disk guide.

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