Video is hard on my poor drives.
 

I use Western Digital 100GB and 200GB Special Edition hard drives for all of my video editing. I defrag these drives at least twice a week. Look at this shit.......This is what happens when you import, edit, encode, and delete over 6 hours of FINISHED video every week on a PC. I may be looking at other editing solutions in the near future.

http://www.ampcontent.com/Pics/Defrag.jpg

I know what it is...

HDD sucks. You just make some vid editing and those bastards are fucked up. :feels-hot

be prepared to rma those puppies soon. I have had to send in 2 so far (out of 8) for 2 month old drives... encoding and editing is tough on ata drives I spose.

I have been using the 100GB drives for about a year with no problems so far. (knock on wood) The 200 GB drives are in the new machine and on Firewire....They are only about 2 months old.....You better not have just jinxed me. :feels-hot

Aaron,

I have similar issues with doing video and multi track music editing. It is hell on the drive.

I few tips...

1) Keep your OS on a seperate dive / partition from your data.
Its best to have it on on a seperate drive...
I keep an 30gig drive on hand for OS and OS related shit.
Then applications go on a 100gig, then I have the data drives internal I have a 120, external I have 420 gigs of firewire/ide's

2) A fast firewire array for raw editing works wonders.

3) Dont buy shitty drives :) 10,000 rpm's, scsi is even better but I dont know many people who still use scsi unless there in a raid.

4) Common sense use highest ata settings you can, dont overclock your processor, make sure dma settings are correct

5) Dont run stock windows defrag, it does such a shitty job, I use O&O defrag, I also dont like norton as it adds so many components that seem to fire when you least expect it which is bad for audio work, not necessarly the case with video though.

By the way, the Cannon G3 came in yesterday...Fucking nice...I'm loving it

Oh yea if you use software that supports a scratch disk concept, try to have a partition at the very least, or a whole drive dedicated to the scratch disk.