Discussion regarding hard disk setup

Question

Hello all and a Merry Christmas. I am running the Adobe CS6 suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects and Audition), Avid Media Composer 6 and Davinci Resolve Lite 9 on my system. I have been reading various hard disk setup including the one that Ham has posted. Uptil now I have been using just one hard disk for everything. I know that is bad. I never had the money. But now I do. Here is how I think it should be like and it is very similar to the 3 disk setup mentioned by Ham.
500GB 7200 RPM for C: (OS, Programs, Pagefiles, Misc stuff like documents, etc)
1TB 7200 RPM for D: (Media Projects and Files)
500GB 7200 RPM for E: (Exports, Previews and Cache)
I can't afford a raid drive because I'd want a Raid 5 and that is considerably out of my budget. I'll get one as soon as I can. Now I have a desktop. I was thinking of having the media drive to be external with a good enclosure with a heat sink and a fan. I have an eSata port, USB 3.0 and USB 2.0. I'll keep the other drives internally and keep the media drive external because of the heat issues. Is this the right path or should I have all the drives internally? I do have a good and an airy casing. Its the HAF 922 with liquid cooling (Corsair H60) for the CPU. Please help me out. Thanking you guys in advance.

Answer 1

Imagine a very popular nightclub, that opens at 10 PM and long rows of people are waiting to come in.
If that nightclub only has a single door that can be used by single person only at one time, used for both entry and exit, you can imagine the waiting for people outside can be long or people inside waiting to exit. The first thing to do is make another door, one for entry only and one for exit only. That reduces the queues. The next thing to do is create multiple doors, let's say two on the North side, one for entry and one for exit, plus two doors on the South side, again one for entry and one for exit.
I imagine you get the drift. Well, each door is like a physical SATA connection, traffic can only go in one direction at a time and the people or data on eather side of the door or SATA connection have to wait. That is a simple reason why more disks are better for the multitude of tasks that need to be performed during editing. The more doors or SATA connections, the less waiting there is and the more enjoyable it is.
The C: drive for OS & programs and pagefile is mostly used for reading and housekeeping, the staff only entrance.
Other drive(s) or doors are used for projects, media, media cache, previews and exports. The slower the drive, the narrower the door, the faster the disk, the wider the door. How to organize access to the drives depends on your editing style and material, just like the number of doors in the nightclub depend on the number of visitors and their visiting patterns.
If you do smallish projects with rather easy codecs and limited or no multicam editing, the system requirements are not very hard, but if you do large and complex projects with difficult codecs and lost of multicam editing, you need a much sturdier system. A small nightclub out in the country requires less doors than a huge nightclub in a big city that caters to movie stars, celebrities and other VIP's, especially if they use the latest and greatest in presentation technology (of course with corresponding prices).
I keep coming back to this nightclub, because I think the analogy works quite well to explain that there is not one answer that suites all needs. Basically it boils down to available budget and the circumstances you are in.  Now, with a 500 GB disk available, I assume your system is not the latest. I would keep it simple, forget a SSD for the moment as a boot disk, it may be overkill in your current system, and get as many 1+ TB Seagate 7200.14 or WD Caviar Blacks as your budget allows (up to 5). When you buy a new system in the future, you can take these disks along to the new system.