Solved Black Friday Desktop Comp Deals - Which is Best?

HI Derek - From you pic I see you have 4 drives on your comp which now makes me confused (unless I am looking too deeply into this). So with this new desktop I now have 2 hard drives inside, and my external WD drive. The current workflow (at least when I had my laptop with the one hard drive) is I would shoot 2-3 cams of footage and use dig audio recorder so I had cam 1: vid with audio, cam 2 vid with audio, cam 3 vid with audio, dig audio recorder. After I finish recording the event I would move all the video and audio clips from the cams to the ext drive so I have all my vid and audio in a safe spot and eventually can delete the data off the cams. So now when I go to use the new desktop I have my SSD drive and the larger harder drive. I did as you said in above so when I save my Sony Movie Studio projects should I be saving to the larger size hard drive or to my external drive? Again, I want to make sure I am making use of all the drives and power efficiently to get the best workflow out of this new desktop. Thank you in advance.

There is no concrete rules to all this.
Everything I have said is a suggestion/starting point.
It's up to you to experiment and work out what works best for you.

I have lots of drives only because I have lots of large Video files from many years of work.
Soon I will need to replace many of the smaller drives with just a few larger high capacity drives.

This is what I have said in a previous reply to you.

This workflow gives you the fastest/best performance.
Drive 1 (2TB HDD) is what all your Source Media Files should live on - this is a Read Only drive.
Drive 2 (External drive) is what the rendered videos are being Saved to - this is a Write Only drive.
When you are rendering a video, all the media files are being read from the 2TB Hard Drive, then getting processed by Movie Studio, CPU and GPU, and finally being saved to the external hard drive.

When you are finished rendering, you may then like to move the new video files from Drive 2 (External Hard Drive) back onto the Drive 1 (2TB HDD) and into Documents or Videos. The choice is yours. Everyone likes to use their own particular workflow that works best for them and makes sense to them.

If you are using External Hard Drives, make sure they are connected to the blue USB 3.0 ports if your Hard Drive supports this - this is 10x faster than USB 2.0

Drive 3 = your Solid State Drive, this is what Windows 10 and all your programs lives on.
If you have lots of room left on this drive, you could create a new folder on this drive, that you use to render all your videos to, for a faster workflow instead of worrying about connecting the external hard drive. However you don't want to keep your videos on the SSD permanently and should move them back onto the 2TB HDD or External Drive after rendering has finished.

If all of this sounds too complicated, forget about the SSD and External Hard Drive and just use the 2TB hard drive for everything. Everything will still work with just with one Hard Drive, just every so slightly slower.
If you use one hard drive only, this is what would happen: When you are rendering a video, all the media files are being read from the 2TB Hard Drive, then getting processed by Movie Studio, CPU and GPU, and finally being saved back to the 2TB Hard Drive. This workflow means that the Hard Drive has to Read/Write at the same time. This is what happens on most people's computers.

As I also said in another previous message, the ideal setup is to install a 2nd HDD inside of your computer. Then you don't have to worry about connecting external hard drives and will get maximum performance. The external hard drive could then be used as a Backup drive only.