What drive do you write videos to?

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urushi
Posts: 1
Joined: Fri Sep 09, 2022 3:56 pm

What drive do you write videos to?

Post by urushi »

I'm wondering what drive you use to write videos to. I had been using my computer's internal drive to write each disc to. But I stopped doing that because I feel that writing 30-40 GB per movie could not possibly be good for the life of my internal SSD. So I'm thinking about getting an external 128 GB drive to write each MKV to and then compress it with Handbrake to a different drive.

Any recommendations on cheap 128 GB drives for this use? Has to have USB C.
Woodstock
Posts: 9912
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 11:21 pm

Re: What drive do you write videos to?

Post by Woodstock »

"One with lots of space" is the simple answer. Almost always one of my network drives, because rarely is there enough space on a "local" drive.

If your network can sustain 100Mb/s or better, it's usually faster than a local drive, except SSDs. And SSDs are rarely big enough to write lots of files to.
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jinx100
Posts: 137
Joined: Wed Mar 13, 2013 5:58 pm

Re: What drive do you write videos to?

Post by jinx100 »

I write the original MKV to a WD portable 1TB hard drive. They are fast enough and cheap and reliable though you may need an adapter for USB C. Then I can take the portable drive to a more powerful computer for Handbrake compression of the movie.
dcoke22
Posts: 2560
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2020 11:25 pm

Re: What drive do you write videos to?

Post by dcoke22 »

I have four 1TB M.2 SSD drives in a RAID 4 configuration connected via Thunderbolt 3 that I use as scratch space. That's about 3 TB of working space that's fault tolerant. Once things are ripped and processed, they get offloaded onto my local network storage.

Previously I used a Sandisk Extreme Portable 512GB SSD. That had just a USB-C USB 3.1 (10gb/s) connection. It was plenty fast enough and despite beating on it for more than a year using it as work space for processing video files, it held up fine. In the end I wanted something faster and larger.

My typical workflow is to make a complete decrypted backup of a disc, then make .mkv files from the backup. Drive speed doesn't matter when ripping from the optical disc, but it matters a lot when making .mkv files from the backup.
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