Configuring HD’s

[Edward Troxel]

Leaver your 80 Gig as your C drive. Just add the new drive as a new letter.

All programs should be installed on the C drive and use the new drive for your video.

Edward Troxel

[Jeremy Rochefort]

The real ideal scenario is the following (for space purposes)
1 x drive for software – Vegas etc (your 80Gb) (C Drive)
1 x drive for footage – 100+ gb drive
1 x drive for render – 100+ gb drive

You can use just the setup you have with your footage on the C drive and render to your 250 gig – not the ideal scenario since not only does footage take up LARGE amounts of space, but you ideally don’t want footage on your software drive. You do get faster renders if your source and destination are on different drives.

Jeremy

MJ Productions

[Stubenkastl]

It is hard to say but most likely you might get a small advantage if you move the source files to a different HD than the rendered output.

Imagine a drive is reading a video file for Vegas and so the arm moves to this location. If you do not write to a different location at THIS drive the HD will read the next file or piece of this file perhaps close to this location. So the arm has not to move very far (depends on the time how long it has to wait for the next read before it goes to the save area). But if you WRITE in between then the arm will jump to a different location where space is. For the next read the arm has to position again. In addition to this some drives get problems with their buffered contents – in the worst case they clear it when you write.

And it depends how fragmented your drive is. The less the more sense it will make to use different HDs and the faster Vegas will render because the HDs are faster and the arm does not have to move so much. And it depends on the partition size – the bigger the further away fraqmented file pieces might be.

But there is one more file that is sadly important – the Virtual Memory with the Page File. M$ still does a not so good job and it uses it a lot even with WinXP. This works – depending on the installed memory and other running tasks – against Vegas.

So I guess the best combination would be to read the files for Vegas from a different HD than on what the system is and to write to the HD where the system is – in case that you have only 2 HDs. This all is based on the assumption that your HDs have the same speed. If not just think that Vegas has to read much more than it writes when it renders – if you use a compression like AVI to MPEG. So the files to read should be on the faster HD.

But in any case – do not expect to speed up Vegas so that you might get dizzy 😉 I mostly do not watch Vegas rendering for hours and so the problem might be not so big.

If you really want to speed up something than put your Internet browser support folders (temp folder, etc.) into a RAM-disk. Most people do not realize that Internet is one of the most challenging tasks for a HD… But this is a different forum I guess 😉 And perhaps you have high-speed and do not use those folders at all.

[Jeremy Rochefort]

It is hard to say but most likely you might get a small advantage if you move the source files to a different HD than the rendered output

You most definitely get a very noticeable difference in render speed if the source and target are on different drives.

It is always advisable for different locations when working with video. In todays day and age of relatively fast machines, drives and related hardware, this has become one fo the benefits of multi-drive systems.

With the advent of SATA II drives and interfaces, this increase in speed has become even more noticeable.

Jeremy

MJ Productions

[Stubenkastl]

In respect of “very noticable” I cannot confirm your statement here on my computer – sorry + it depends on more than simply “different drives”. And it respect of SATA II (what does not stand for 3 GB but is mostly missused) – 3 GB/s is a speed that no HD can handle. They had/have problems with ATA 133 or even ATA 100 alread. Simply make a write/read speed test to see what your HD can handle.

[Allen Zagel]

Very simply. 3 drives. Your current C drive and that’s where all your prograsms reside. 2nd drive label it “capture” or something lik that and the 3rd drive for the Files.

Either csn be a slave to your C drive. Are they IDE or SATA? You should have 2 IDE channels at least.

All you have to do to set them up is format them NTFS if you’re running XP or W2K and just create your directories. Don’t install the opersting system. They’re just file drives.

Now capture to a directory on your Capture drive. You can set a “render” directory on either drive. Doesn’t matter. You can keep all your VEG files in a directory of either C or the Files drive. Output your finished video to the Files drive.

Allen

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[Anotheruser]

Defragmentation of both files and swap file are a huge problem in Windows. Having produced music on Windows PC’s for over 10 years, I can tell you with confidence that a fragmented drive will cause serious performance issues… and using the stock defrag utility that ships with Windows will do little to remedy the problem.

If you want a terrific defragmentation program that truly optimizes your HD’s for audio and video high performance, look into a wonderful program called Diskeeper Pro. It is essentially the defragmenting and swap file optimization utility that Microsoft should have implemented with Windows.

I don’t endorse a lot of third party software, but this one is.. well. a “keeper” and I highly rcommend it.

diskeeper.com

[Vegasarian]

Certainly cant say you dont get your questions answered on here!!!
Thanks all.