When I decided to start this videography business, it was a “necessity being the mother of invention” type of deal. We were just wrapping up a program at my church called “40 Days of Purpose” and were planning a special shindig on one Sunday to celebrate it. I decided to purchase a camera for the purpose of making a short video to be played on the special day. Basically all I did was go out and buy a camera. I had, a short time before that, purchased a basic editing program (Pinnacle Studio) to use with my consumer D8 cam. So, I had the cam to shoot with, the program to edit with. SO what about a computer? Well, we already had that too.
Our computer was a Sony that we had purchased a couple of years earlier. Its specs were pretty good even after two years: 2.2 GHz processor, 512 meg of RAM. I had a total of about 300GB of hard drive space which I thought was massive.
Low Drive Space
It didn’t take long to realize that 300GB of space was miniscule compared to the actual requirements of working with video. At about thirteen minutes of video per gigabyte of space, what was left of my 300 GB quickly evaporated into thin air. I had no more room inside my computer box (these Sony’s are bad about that). However, there seemed to be PLENTY of room in my wallet. There certainly weren’t a lot of bills jockeying for space in there. It was enough for the church project but after I started shooting weddings, it was horribly under equipped. Add to that the fact that my first weddings were shot for little or NO money and you have a snowball heading downhill. The Pinnacle nearly drove me totally nuts! It was very unstable and if it locked my computer up once, it did it sixteen gazillion times. I now think that part of that problem was the result of low hard drive space.
Answers
My computer came from the factory with a DVD burner as well as a DVD ROM drive and a floppy disk drive. The problem was that I was out of space and out of ports. So I set about looking for answers. These answers came from a variety of sources: My videography mentor, the local small computer shop, a semi-well known small chain store in Tulsa, and a smattering of common sense and ingenuity from my own brain. Here is what I did:
Motherboard
First, since my motherboard came with only IDE connections, I yanked the fax modem card and replaced it with a SATA card. It was pretty much as simple as replacing memory, simply unplug and plug back in. One thing you should know about this is that, at least in older mother boards and at the time I did mine, you could only achieve the 1.5 SATA speed through a SATA PCI card. The 3.0 speed was not doable. While this was not optimum, it was acceptable and the best I was going to be able to get without replacing the mother board and incurring more expense than I wanted. However, this did allow me to hook up more hard drives which was my ultimate goal.
Box Space (case)
Now I needed more space. Since the DVD-ROM drive was superfluous, I removed the floppy drive and slid a Western Digital SATA 250 GB in there. Then I yanked the DVD-ROM and slid a Western Digital SATA 500 GB in there. These are both hooked up to the SATA card. I put a sub-200 GB WD IDE in the empty extra hard drive bay. Couple all of that with the 100+ that came with my computer and voila! I have over 1TB of space.
500 Fit
The 500 didn’t exactly fit the hole for the DVD-ROM. It was smaller so I had to purchase “rails” (also available from any computer shop). One thing you should know here is that there is not a science to this where there is only one way that will work. There are several holes in the sides of the drive. You will find that only some of them will match up with the holes in your rails. This is fine. The main thing about installing HDD’s is that they need to be solid so they cannot vibrate and they need to be installed so that they can be kept cool somehow.
250 Fit
The 250 fit inside the floppy enclosure like a glove but it was too long. If I slid it back inside the enclosure far enough to make everything fit, the power cords were bound up. If I slid it far enough forward that the power cords didn’t bind up, the front cover of the computer didn’t fit back on just right. In the end I just left it off. Who am I trying to impress. I have no plans to enter my Sony in a beauty contest.
Heat
I was concerned about heat build-up inside the box and especially in and around the 250GB and 500GB drives. Heat dissipation can be critical to large hard drives. The only way to mount a drive where the floppy was, was to mount it in the enclosure that the floppy was in. Unfortunately that enclosure was more of a metal sleeve that the drive slid into. After checking with the local computer shop, I drilled oodles of holes in the enclosure with about a 3/8" drill bit and put the 250 in it. Of course I made sure that ALL of the metal shavings were contained somewhere on the mother board...:-) Actually, that was a big concern so after I drilled and installed the HDD, I did a very thorough job of blowing out the inside of the box.
500 Ventilation
I had placed the 500 way up above in another part of the box where the DVD-ROM drive was. Again, out came the drill. I drilled a series of holes in the area that contained the pre-existing vent holes. The purpose was simply to make the holes that were already there much larger. In the end, I drilled so many that that whole piece of metal just sort of fell out. When I saw where this was heading, I took needle nose pliers and helped this process along until there was one big hole where there had been hundreds of tiny ones. I made another trip to the local computer shop and came home with a couple of different sizes of fans. To install the fan (upon advice from that computer shop) I simply took four zip ties and tied the fan tight to four remaining little holes in the back of the computer. Specifically, the fan sits inside the box blowing out. This fan mainly pulls air in from the front of the top part of the computer, across the 500GB drive and out the back.
More Ventilation
The factory 120GB, the 250, and the other smaller add on drive were located close together on the bottom part of the box. I was concerned that the small fan may not be enough to cool all of these dtives so, again, after consultation with others, I decided to simply leave the whole side piece of the computer box off. When I am doing intensive video editing and want to insure good cooling, I simply take a small (approximately ten inch) household fan and point it at the inside of the box. I try to make sure that the air circulates in at one corner and out at the far corner. Simple touch tests during editing with the fan on vs. off reveal that the process works extremely well.
Power Supply
Power to the units was an issue as well. Since my computer only had the “legacy” power plugs, and since the last available inside the box was used up long ago, I had to find another solution. The answer was simple: Splitters. The process of using splitters can go on forever as long as you don’t exceed the capacity of your power supply. To insure that this does not happen, you will need to access the documentation that comes with your new drives as well as your original computer documentation or online resources.
Jumpers
The 250 GB drive documentation advised me that if the drive was to function in the 1.5 SATA mode, we would need to jumper it which we did according to the instructions. The 500 gave no such instructions and though the Tulsa store where I purchased it said that there would be jumpering that would need to be done, it works just fine without it…to this point anyway.
Set Up
The Western Digital Drives were a breeze to set up with their “Data Lifeguard Tools” disk that I had from a previous purchase and which is available for download from this site: http://support.wdc.com/download/.
Regrets
The only regrets I have about this process is that I wasted my money on the 250 and the other smaller drive. The 250 was $90 while the 500 was only $120. Had I dropped the coin to begin with, and opted for all 500 GB drives I would now have a total of 1.6 TB of HD space for very little more money and the same amount of work.
Total Cost
Including the three add-on drives, the SATA card and tax, I have about $350 invested in this project. None of this equipment was purchased from online discounters such as TigerDirect.com or NewEgg.com which could have saved even more money.
Bottom Line
The bottom line here is that this was a relatively simple project for someone who had very little experience in this kind of thing prior to starting it. It is not rocket science. Most importantly, when it comes to the physical installation of the drives almost anything goes as long as you keep the drives solid, cool, and adequately powered. (Actually some say that installing them firmly is not really necessary but it wasn’t worth the risk to me.) Go ahead…give it a shot. You know you need the space. Good Luck.
