Harmy said:

So, anyway, I was wondering if some of you guys could give me a little advice about rendering (not quite there yet but just want the info) when I'm rendering using x264 and I have the system HDD in my laptop and 1 USB2 HDD and 1 USB3 HDD where should I put what to ensure as fast and smooth a rendering as possible?

You want to put your files on a different physical drive for each step of the process, so that no one step is ever reading and writing at the same time to the same drive (to prevent the wasteful head repositioning that occurs, even with different logical drives on the same physical drive), however it depends where the software puts the temporary files it creates as they will not all be in RAM.

For example, if the encoder creates elementary video, audio and subtitle files and then muxes them together in a later step, you want your source files on a different drive than the elementary files, but the final destination files could be back on the source drive as the final step is only writing and not reading.

I would say you could put your source files on the USB2 drive, since I doubt encoding will be fast enough to require data at greater than USB2 speeds. Any temporary files could be stored on your system drive and then the final results output to the USB3 drive.

However, if by source files you mean different video and audio files where multiple files must be accessed in parallel, best speed will be from an SSD because no head repositioning is required to read from each file.

Hard drives are best for large files read/written in a linear fashion.