Storing Footage on the same Internal Hard Drive that has your operating system?

[mark-mvs]

I have a Mac Pro with 4 internal Hard Drives. This may be a silly question but I remember many years ago we were told NOT to store video footage on the same internal hard drive that had our operating system on it. When I called the Apple Care/Mac folks, they told me that things have changed and now they recommend (if you are using an internal hard drive for video editing) that you use the same hard drive that your operating system/applications are on for your video editing. Then when you are done with the editing work, you transfer the finished product to your storage hard drives. They claim that there is a potential loss in quality if you do the editing work on a hard drive separate from your operating system...?

Have you guys heard anything like this?

For those of you who edit on an internal hard drive, do you use the drive that has your operating system on it or do you consider that a "no no?"

Thanks
Mark

[DavidPartington]

Well, as always the answer is yes you can do it - but no I don't recommend it.

Apple say you can do it - simply because most macs only ship with one HDD anyway - so anyone with iMovie has to be able to use the OS drive.  There will be no loss of 'quality' as such, but what you are doing is sharing the HDD bandwidth with your OS, so as you start using more memory then OS starts swapping memory to the HDD and so that bandwidth can't be used for video streaming.

I also have a MacPro with 4 internal HDDs.  My boot drive is just that - a boot drive where my apps and personal data are stored.  It's also what gets backed up through Time Machine.

The other 3 drives are used for video only.

If you have this option - take it!