Another concern is the space left on your drive: a full hard drive can be much slower than an empty one.

Faster is your drive, better is your chance to avoid the bottleneck of reading/writing your file and sending the data to the next processing phase in CPU/GPU. Usually uncompressed format is faster to encode and decode, but again it depends on other parameters in your computer system like your CPU & GPU. Sony RAW is not as compressed as XAVC-I or DNxHD file formats. It tells you the bandwidth needed when recording RAW footage (storage space). This number does not mean much regarding the need for your hard drive speed. “For instance, I frequently use Raw 4k footage from a Sony F55, which Sony tells us is 1000Mbps / 125 MBps.”

As you may already know, reading and writing a movie file, is not only about the speed of your hard drive but also how fast the file is decoded and encoded.

If you are concerned to get the right hard drives for your work using DaVinci Resolve, it does not make sense to me to look at your hard drives configuration only, separate from your GPU/CPU selection. Hmmm… I am with Joseph and Jim on this one. Thanks all, in anticipation of useful equations. I’m happy to invest in something like the OWC Accelsior 4M2 for it’s eye-bleeding 6000MBps if I really need to, but I’d like to be able to calculate exactly what is necessary if I can. I will probably never need to edit more than four streams of this footage at one time, but I’m suspecting drives capable of 600MBps sustained read / write won’t be up to the task. To edit one steam of this footage in real time (let’s assume my GPU / CPU / RAM are equal to the task) how much faster than 125MBps do I need my drives to run? If I’m editing two streams of the footage, do I simply need to double the numbers, or is life more complicated than that? I’m in the process of speccing a new edit machine and am wondering if there is an equation I can use to calculate how fast I need my disks to run to able to manage different flavours of footage.įor instance, I frequently use Raw 4k footage from a Sony F55, which Sony tells us is 1000Mbps / 125 MBps.

Davinci resolve speed editor driver