1 drive or 2?

[Angelo Mike]

Yes. As for backups, if your computer gets fried because of a lightning strike or surge in energy (or even an accident like the whole computer being knocked over), having your media in a physically separate backup is very important.

Not only that, but your hard drive drive performs more slowly when it’s having to read the operating system and media on the same drive.

I have two hard drives in my computer, one for Windows 7 and software installation, and another for data like Word documents. All my Vegas projects and data, though, are on external drives.

[Joe Tavola]

Ya i have external for backup.. that’s not my question. I’m specifically asking for Vegas use, rendering and working with the projects. Does it perform better/faster if installed on one drive (C:) and then all the media on D: and rendering to that drive too? Is that the “proper” way of setup.. sounds like it is.

[Mike Kujbida]

All programs on drive C and all Vegas stuff on drive D.
Renders to be made on drive D only.
Some folks (myself included) have 3 drives and render to this third one.
To be perfectly honest, the speed increase by doing this is minimal.

[John Rofrano]

[Joe Tavola] “Does it perform better/faster if installed on one drive (C:) and then all the media on D: and rendering to that drive too? Is that the “proper” way of setup.. sounds like it is.”

Yes it is. The reason is that you don’t want to have drive head contention between the OS and your render. The OS is constantly accessing the C: drive and in a memory constrained situation it will be writing to the swap file. You don’t want that to interfere with writing to your video file. So video on D: and programs/swap on C: is the recommended approach.

Some will go as far as recommending 3 drives, one for OS, one to read video files (your project drive) and one to write video files (your render drive). This way there is no contention between reading the source file and rendering/writing to the target file. The problem today is that most renders are CPU bound so there is little to be gained by this approach but for SD video with smart-rendering there may be a benefit.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Joe Tavola]

thanks all for the feedback, i will go that root of C: and D: (not C,D,E).

[Stephen Mann]

You can have 26 hard disk drives in Windows, but you ONLY want your O/S and Program Files (executables) on Drive C:. Put all your video assets on the other drives.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “Yes it is. The reason is that you don’t want to have drive head contention between the OS and your render. The OS is constantly accessing the C: drive and in a memory constrained situation it will be writing to the swap file. You don’t want that to interfere with writing to your video file. So video on D: and programs/swap on C: is the recommended approach. “

That’s a subset of my recommendations.

The basic idea is that a hard drive is like a muscle car: really fast in a straight line, not so good on twisty back country roads. If you’re working with a simple project, like a single video input file, you’re best off with the OS, etc. on the C: drive and the project on another.

However, that starts to change as the size of your project grows. I first discovered these issues on a wedding project that included one HDV track and 6-8Mpixel stills from three photographers. This was in 2006, so HD rendering to Blu-ray was pretty slow… but I was seeing it much slower than expected, and also Vegas was pretty crashy.

Turns out I was “thrashing” my project drive… that’s when you’re doing so many seeks, the speed is basically dominated by seek times. Being an audio guy from way back (seek times are the main limiting factor in multi-track audio projects), once I realized this, I moved a big pile of of the stills to the C: drive, rendering to a USB drive, and my render when over 3x faster.

The C: drive does get busy, but with many of our modern setups, only when you start a program, or change program behavior. With lower amounts of memory, there’s paging of data to/from disc and paging of code from disc, as part of Windows’ virtual memory system, as well as the occasional load of a new DLL. The thing to realize is that all of this code is tiny compared to the size of media files. And if you have gigabytes of RAM, in practice these days, you’re not going to notice much sustained HDD activity on the C: drive during a render, particularly if you’re just rendering, and not doing 20 other things at the same time.

In my setup, I usually have three fast (internal) drives; my system stuff on C:, a general purpose small project and scratch drive on D:, and a plug-in frame for adding large project drives (plugs in a SATA drive as if it were a cartridge-style drive). When things get big (I’ve done animations and music videos with 50+ video tracks), I’ll have media on all three. For a basic one or two camera video, it’s on the D: drive, maybe rendered to another drive.

And of course, the other reason not to render to your C: drive is if you’re using an SSD, particularly a lower cost SSD made from MLC flash, you want to avoid unnecessary write, as these drives don’t last anywhere near as many write/erase cycles as an HDD. You also don’t want your swap partition there (Windows lets you put it anywhere).

[John Rofrano] “Some will go as far as recommending 3 drives, one for OS, one to read video files (your project drive) and one to write video files (your render drive). This way there is no contention between reading the source file and rendering/writing to the target file. The problem today is that most renders are CPU bound so there is little to be gained by this approach but for SD video with smart-rendering there may be a benefit.”

I’d go so far as to say that if your render isn’t CPU-bound, you’re doing something wrong. That’s not a problem if the cause is GPU acceleration… if the GPU is really working for you, you should see some decent levels of GPU activity (grab GPU Shark if you don’t have a GPU monitor), but perhaps CPU only hitting 60-80%. There’s an inherent communications delay in Vegas’ use of GPU acceleration, but it should be a net win.

While I like three or more drives, I don’t recommend a dedicated drive for rendering output. Unless you’re rendering uncompressed (I do this sometimes for animation, to preserve alpha channel between projects), the output data rate isn’t large… generally much, much smaller than the input data rate, at least if you have anything at all to worry about. One big reason to put the output somewhere other than an input drive is just to keep that output render from slowing down the input with additional seeks. I pretty routinely rendering output to C: or a USB drive; either one is virtually certain to not be the critical element in a render (eg, if you’re not approaching 100% CPU, something else is the problem).

-Dave

[Nigel O’neill]

Dave

Love your explanations and the effort you put in. It’s great to see such passion 🙂