-
Building a PC for MC…
In an effort to save money (no good can come of that statement, eh?), my boss wants to investigate building our own PC to run Media Composer. Our IT guy has put together a system for about 2K (vice a 4kish box from BiWay). The only thing that stands out is the media drives. He spec’d out 4 500gb 7200rpm for media drives. Will those work? I believe he’s going internal eSata. I’m also looking at an external eSata solution from CalDigit, but that seems to be a Mac-centric thing.
This box will NOT be doing a lot of intensive layering do-daa’s. Mostly 2-3 layer SD stuff, digitizing from tape (less) and importing P2 (more).
Thoughts?
Jon
Be curious, not judgmental.
Walt Whitman -
2 Replies
-
If you RAID the 4 internal SATAs you should have a nice box, particularly for pushing SD DV25/50 around. External SATA is not just for Macs 🙂 A client of mine is having a blast on a Dell workstation with external 2TB G-Tech. I highly recommend the combination. He usually cuts in DV25 and HDV.
-
For an overview of a DIY system, check out videoguys.com. Here’s their most recent DIY:
Also, a guy did a custom build on DVXUser. Here’s that thread:
https://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?p=1779682#post1779682
Also, as David said, throwing four SATA drives into a RAID will be plenty fast enough for SD, especially if you go with a RAID0 (no protection, but plenty fast). I have two 500GB SATA drives in a RAID0 here and it’s fast enough to cut SD, DVCProHD, and all flavors of DNxHD, so four will suit you just fine.
External storage is nice if for no other reason than heat management. Having four drives stuffed in a computer case can add a lot of heat very quickly. As long as you have adequate cooling in the computer you should be fine, but it will be a lot hotter than if you ran your storage externally.
Good luck with the system build. Just remember to check their specs to the Avid recommended systems. Primarily, look out for the video card (go with a Quadro from the approved list) and go with Intel processors. AMD may work, but Intel definitely works.
If you build a solid system, post the specs here if you can. I’d like to see what you end up with.
Michael
——————————-
I’ll be working late.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up