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OT: How should I allocate my four internal drive bays?
OT: I need to boost my internal storage on both C:\ and D:\. Cost is a factor, and my existing case has only four internal 3.5″ drive bays. How should I allocate my four existing internal drive bays?
Would it be faster to have a machine where both C:\ and D:\ have RAID 0 arays with two drives each?
Or would it be faster to leave C:\ as a stand-alone drive, and then create D:\ as a RAID 0 array with the remaining three bays?
And about how much difference might there be between these two setups when using Vegas?
Thanks.
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
31 Replies
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You will get as many answers as there are people on the internet. 😉
Here is my setup for my 4 internal drive bays (taken from the PC Equipment page on my web site):
Bay 1 (C:): Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD6400AAKS 640GB 7200
Bay 2 (D:): 1TB Western Digital WD10EACS SATA2 5400-7200
Bay 3&4 (E:): 1TB (2 x WD 500GB WD5000ABYS) SATA2 in a RAID 0I’m about to swap out my D: drive for a 2TB drive because it’s where I keep all of my stock footage, Digital Juice libraries, Sampler data, and daily backup of my C: drive and it’s getting kinda full.
I back up my C: drive to my D: drive every day! (daily incremental using Acronis TrueImage) I back up my RAID 0 to an external 1TB drive every week or whenever I add new camera footage. That leaves me vulnerable for loosing a weeks worth of editing work if the RAID 0 fails. 🙁
If you want redundancy at the expense of some performance, you might want to use 3 bays for a RAID 5. If you use three 2TB drives, you will get 4TB of usable disc space and can survive a single disc failure with no data loss. RAID 5 requires at least 3 discs but you could have more.
The RAID 5 is something I’m considering. It would double my current 2TB’s of storage to 4TB and give me redundancy and I can still partition as D: and E: to keep my stock footage separate from my editing work. I will just get less performance than my RAID 0 but still should be better than a single non-RAID drive.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
John, it turns out you can get a trimmed down version of Acronis True Image for free. From Gizmo’s Freeware:
https://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-drive-imaging-program.htm
>>Owners of Seagate hard drives are eligible to download and use the Seagate Disk Wizard tools. Disk Wizard is essentially a slimmed down version of Acronis True Image that is available for free.
>>Owners of Western Digital hard drives also have a great option for disk imaging. Western Digital offers the Acronis True Image WD Edition which is much the same as what Seagate offers to its users.
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
I am not sure the free versions will do incrementals, but there do appear to be a number of free alternatives.
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
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>>The RAID 5 is something I’m considering. It would double my current 2TB’s of storage to 4TB and give me redundancy and I can still partition as D: and E: to keep my stock footage separate from my editing work.
What is the advantage of keping your stock footage separate from your editing work? What does that get you?
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
What is the advantage of keeping your stock footage separate from your editing work? What does that get you?
Not a whole lot. It just makes it easier from a backup and restore perspective because I never backup my stock media once it’s backed up because it doesn’t change, while I backup my projects quite often. So I get to set up backup and restore at the drive level.
There is no performance advantage or anything like that because both partitions are using the same 3 drives. It’s just a convenience thing. You could argue that there is no need to backup either but a RAID 5 can only sustain a single drive failure so in the if two drives failed at the same time you’d still need a backup.
If you decide to keep everything as one drive that would make perfect sense. Old habits die hard and I really need to get away from the drive letter thingy. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I do back everything up, but even so, so your RAID 5 suggestion is really a good idea.
Is there any way to determine just how much of a bottleneck the CPU is, vis-a-vis the RAID 0 data array? I just opened up Task Manager and Resource Monitor and let Vegas play through the timeline. All four cores were hovering at about 85-90%, while the hard drive usage said 14%. Can that possibly be right?
I guess my question is if I need 7200 RPM spins for D:\, or if 5900 RPM will do it. They have 2TB 5900 RPM spin drives out for $109.00 right now, which is a really great price. If one was to put three of those in RAID 5, one would have 4TB of storage. But how could one know if those are fast enough not to cause a bottleneck?
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
I must now have a clue how to use the Resource Monitor.
Here is a shot of my Resource Monitor when I start playback (Preview > Auto). It looks like the CPU is near pegged, but the Disk appears to be completely pegged, both with the blue line and the green line (whatever they represent). That would seem to indicate (at least to me) that the hard drives are the bottleneck (but not by much).
But it gets confusing. About twenty-four seconds later I took another shot in which the CPU still shows as being maxed out, but now I get a blue line up top of ‘disk’ which is maxed out, but the green line (whatever that is) is down around 18%. What is mind boggling is that one can still see in the CPU window where I started the playback, but now there is no longer any record of the green line ever having been pegged (as it showed twenty-four seconds ago). What’s with that? Isn’t the screen supposed to record a full sixty seconds?
Just to verify what I was seeing, here is another shot taken twenty-six seconds later (fifty seconds total from the very first screen show) which still shows the CPU chugging along, and the Disk ‘blue line’ pegged, but the ‘green line’ still down around 18%. (The spike in Network is when I sent an email.)
And finally, here is a shot from when I finally stopped playback in Vegas almost two minutes later. One can see the Disk blue line dropping off (which makes sense), but CPU shows as having been down around nothing for the full sixty seconds (which is ridiculous).
I guess what I really want to know is if the Disk is the holdup, and how much. That would tell me if there is any value in getting a larger aftermarket case with more drive bays, and how many. But I am not sure I can tell anything from this test, since the screen shots appear to conflict with each other.
Do you have any idea whether the hard drive or the CPU is the bottleneck here? And by how much?
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
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John, why are you running Raid 0? Raid 0 is not mirrored, meaning that you are getting performance, and extended size, but no redundancy…a single failure will take down your RAID entirely.
It would seem like you should be running Raid 1 at a minimum, which at least is creating a mirrored set. That way if one disk goes down, you carry on with the good one. You lose performance, but gain backup automatically.
RAID 5, as I understand it, creates a parity disk. You need 3 disks minimum to implement RAID 5. Correct? Failure of one drive does not require immediate replacement of the defective drive.
Am I missing something in my understanding of this?
Alf
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