1 TB vs 2 TB for HD video editing/storage

Hi there, I have the same camera, and am getting the 27" i7. I'd go with the 2tb as the price uplift is not huge for a lot more storage. You could always add a fw800 external later, but I think for the price go with the 2tb if you can. HD video is rather sizeable.

Ok, I do a lot of video editing on Macs, so here are my suggestions -

Get the 1TB internal drive and use the $150 saved to get yourself a good external 1TB FW800 drive. Keep the internal drive to less than 50% utilization. Use the external drive for media storage (video & photos) and working space, not your internal drive. (Lacie d2 Quadra 1TB drives are going for ~$150 / OWC Mercury Elite 1TB for ~$170.)

Also keep in mind that you should have a separate drive for offline backups, so two external drives would be a good idea - one for working storage, the other for backups. (Time Machine is a great backup utility, just not for video and definitely not on the same drive as your working storage; so if you are interested in using TM, that would be yet another external drive.)

As for disk space requirements, assuming use of iMovie or Final Cut Express, you should estimate about 45GB per hour of video. In a typical FCE project with 1 hour of source video clips, some render files & output files and an iDVD project, the total disk space needed will be somewhere between 65-110GB by the time the project is complete. You can get rid of some or all of that stuff when your project is finished depending on what you want to keep. (I keep the source media clips & FCE project files (with them you can reconstruct your project any time).

I'd personally get the 2TB, AND then still get yourself an external as needed. External HDDs tend to have short life spans, so probably better to have ample internal storage that should be a bit more reliable long term.

And since you still have a G5 model, be sure to pick up the AppleCare plan. Virtually any repair on an iMac will more than pay for the cost of the AppleCare plan. You appear to be someone who holds onto computers long term, so may as well make sure it's covered for at least some of that time. But you can put that off to any time within the first year of ownership. So, you can let your bank account recover a little first.

I came from a Power Mac Dual G5 and was always cramped for internal space even with external drives helping out. I’d say go for the 2 TB internal drive and add external drives for offloading and Time Machine as Martin suggests. The Time Machine drive can be a USB drive, but the first time you back up your system with Time Machine it will go quite a bit faster if you have the option of connecting it via Firewire 800. After that, the incremental backups via USB should be fine.

I like MartinR's suggestion.

1Tb drive - then spend the balance an external drives and backup systemology.

MartinR wrote:
Ok, I do a lot of video editing on Macs, so here are my suggestions -

Great suggestions, but one question: do you not find the FW800 I/O a bottleneck? This is not a loaded question; I'm holding out on SSD performance benchmarks for picking up a new iMac, but have also been contemplating going to a Mac Pro for my next investment (take a look at my post here for my thoughts).

If you are getting by moving HD footage around that renders to 45GB per hour, I think my concerns are moot as I'm nowhere near that sort of overhead and figured my bottlenecks were I/O related.

While SSD and SATA performance is faster than FW800, FW800 is not slow by any means. IMHO they are still the best solution for external storage due to the price/performance ratio of SSDs and iMac's not having ESATA support other than the OWC solution which OWC has stated may invalidate your warranty. If you don't care about your warranty then I'd take a close look at the OWC ESATA solution.

Regards,

Roger