Hello everyone. I just signed up for this site today, so any breaches of protocol/mispostings I hope will be forgiven and corrected.
Now that I’ve covered that, I’m a total Blender newbie, having only played with the software a bit now.
I am an author who a few years ago took the reigns back from the publishing world. This is great, because I’m in control of my creative output, but horrible because I now have to do everything myself!
I run my entire business myself from a laptop. I use openoffice for writing, formatting, and editing, Gimp for cover production, and Audacity for audiobooks(I’m a fan of legally free software). I hope to use Blender for video editing, some green screen stuff, and possibly in the future some 2d animation.
That’s my background now to my questions:
I am rebuilding my tech as of this winter. Due to multiple system failures in the past and another one looming in the next couple of months, I want to use external drives to store my work software and files. That way I can both change systems easily without losing working data, and if necessary work on borrowed systems if I’m caught without one for any reason.
Okay. That’s my background. Here is what I’m thinking:
Laptop, 2 external hard drives. One for programs and files and a second for backups.
Would a 1tb hard drive be enough for all four programs and files, or is there another option I’m not thinking of?
Thanks ahead of time for any suggestions or corrections and for your time.
Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Technical Support”
The difficulty with external drives is that unless you’re doing something special, throughput is much slower than drives directly on the SATA bus. Depending on the resolution of video you’re working with and the numbers of video tracks you’re editing, this speed change can be significant. I would personally advise that you work on the native hardware on your laptop, but make regular backups. You can even set a cron job to do hourlies.
Video editing on a laptop is not a good idea, because it has hardware limitations and later it will stop you from upgrading.
Get a desktop computer, a good hard disk, for video editing you will need lot of Hard disk in long run, because once working you will be saving as uncompressed files and that will take a lot of space.
I am using expansion disk myself, get that, it will be slow but still not that slow. Get a 2 TB minimum.
The main issue for any video editing is RAM and GPU in SLI. If you are going for laptop, make sure you will be able to upgrade to at least 32 GB RAM and a good graphic card like Geforce 980 ti.
Blender has no use of SLI though, but you might have to use other editing software in future, so SLI option will help.
First of all, get a desktop. Desktops are superior to laptops when comparing price to performance, and when using blender you want the best performance you can get. Second, external harddrives are a bad idea. They are annoying to use and vulnerable to damage. Internal harddrives have better speeds because of the sata connections and you are less likely to spill coffee on them. (or damage them in a different way)
For reliabillity, you might want to take a look at Raid1. It basically means mirroring 2 harddrives, so that if one of them fails, the other still has your data. It is much like using a harddrive as backup, except that both harddrives are main drive and backup. This means that if one of them fails you can simply replace it for a new one, and the data from the second drive will automatically be copied to the other drive, like nothing happened. You can even use your pc normally with one of the harddrives broken.
So, if I’m understanding right, You’re saying that I should use the externals for backing up files only, and keep my programs on the native drive for operations because of speed issues with the externals? As long as I can also keep a backup of the actual programs on the externals(just in case), that’s fine.
Also, you’re the only one who didn’t mention that I should get a desktop. Do you think that a laptop has the power to do what I want to do, or were you just focusing on the external drive question?
Sure, there are laptops powerfull enough, but they are much more expensive than a desktop with the same performance. Blender will quite literally use 100% of the performance of your pc. This means that a laptop will also easily overheat, so the performance will decrease. Don’t be fooled if the specifications of a laptop say it has an intel i7 [some numbers]m CPU. It won’t have the same performance as a desktop version.
Hi, for performance you can calculate about 50% compare to a desktop CPU.
If you already have a laptop think about to change you internal drive to a SSD.
I have done this with two laptops and got significant faster workflow but is does not affect render times.
If you have USB 3 ports an external drive can be faster than internal, may you post what laptop you have exactly.
I can boot a laptop much faster from an external fast USB 3 stick than from the internal hard disk.
I use dropbox for my backups, but I’m not terribly tech savvy, so not sure if that is an option for you. It does mean I have my stuff available to me no matter where I go, and I don’t have to bring drives with me
If you’re working with open source software, backing up to an external medium is no problem… but it’s also not really necessary as getting the program again only costs the bandwidth for the download. If you have proprietary software, it should be equally moot since you’ll either have the original install media (CD, DVD, etc.) or you’re using it via cloud subscription, in which case we’re back to talking the cost of bandwidth. Now, if you have any customized settings for the software (hotkeys, themes, scripts, and so on), then those would certainly be worth backing up. The software itself? Not such a big deal.
I didn’t mention a desktop because I don’t know enough about your situation to judge whether that’s the best option for you. If mobility is important to you (you travel a lot or you don’t have a dedicated desk/workspace for working), then a desktop probably isn’t a great call. However, if budget and the ability to do hardware upgrades are important to you (plus having an easier time setting up a pair of color calibrated monitors for editing), then a laptop isn’t going to cut it. In terms of power, most mid-class laptops can edit a few layers of HD video without problems. If you want to a lot of compositing, more than 2-3 tracks of video, or video at 4k resolution, the mid-class laptops are going to have a more difficult time (you’ll be able to do it, realtime playback will be problematic and you’ll definitely want to cut using proxies).
Also, if you do opt for the desktop path, that changes my suggestion a bit. With a desktop, you can set yourself up with an external RAID enclosure that has 4-5 drives in it. With that RAID connected via ESATA, your performance should be good enough to edit footage right from the external enclosure, plus you’ll have the reliability of a RAID (though even with the RAID I’d still recommend doing off-site backups… I’m paranoid about maintaining my data’s integrity). The set-up is a bit more expensive than a standard external drive, but that can be mitigated by the cost savings you’ll get from going with a desktop machine.