Premiere Pro + External Hard Drive Best Practices

I see this repeated over and over. I have not found it to be true. I have found over and over again that a single dedicated 7200 internal drive for media will work just fine. This is editing RT employing mainly DV, HDV, Cannon XF and Sony XdCam up to 50 Mbps. This includes multicamera projects up to four cameras.

Since 2002 I have set up at least 10 separate Premiere based NLE PCs and have witnessed hundreds of projects across these many systems edited with Premiere 6.0, 6.5, Pro 1.5 Pro 2.0, CS4, CS5x, and CS6.  The only time when hard discs became an issue was a misadventure using USB external drives.

I experimented, early in DV editing days, with advising editors to save their graphics, music, and project files on a separate internal media drive. However I could never get a consistent compliance with that, so for file management sake, I began having users keep all scratch disc dialogues checked to "same as project". That way they just needed to be certain to create their project folder on a Media drive, and save their project into that folder.

Things have been smooth with that. I think that over the years I've had enough testing to say with confidence that anyone will be fine with it for general use with codecs up to 50Mbps per stream.

The only place I've found some benefit is in targeting a separate internal drive for exports. This can speed up exports a bit, but I haven't found wild differences.

So a typical system I might set up or use would map like this:

     C: System (usually a raid0)

     D: internal 7200 rpm Media 1 (Active Premiere Projects)

     G: USB\Firewire External Drives  Storage (Inactive premiere projects and offline file storage)

      Additional video edit space set up as:

     E: internal 7200 rpm Media 2 (Active Premiere Projects)

Again, lots of experience with this set up and no drive performance issues.