new computer build

[Stephen Mann]

[Jay Allen] “Does Vegas pro 12 support 2 cpu’s
Would i be better off with quadro k5000 or two quadro 4000’s
Any caveats to know about SSD’s… using for boot and scratch drive
Has anyone used 4tb drives in raid
Has anyone used drobo with thunderbolt”

Vegas doesn’t care about CPU count – Windows does. You need Windows 7 PRO to get multiprocessor support.

I am a bit fuzzy on the advanced video cards, but generally, as I understand it, the more CUDA cores you have, the better the throughput with Vegas.

I recently put an SSD on one of my laptops and I am pleased with the performance, but if you search the web you will find mixed opinions about using SSD for your project or scratch disk. My motherboard only supports 8Gb, but my next one will support 16Gb and I plan to experiment with using an 8Gb RAMdisk for scratch space.

I don’t use RAID here. I just don’t see any advantage. If I did, then it would be RAID5 and probably with 2Tb drives. Mostly due to cost. You might want to wait a few months for Hitachi to start manufacturing helium drives which will start at 4Tb and expected to reach 6Tb per drive within a year.

As above, no experience with DROBO, but look at their specs. The last time I looked, the DROBO write speeds were really bad, making them useless as a working disk. OK for backup – which is the design purpose of the DROBO, but dreadfully slow for real work.

A note about drive speeds. The published disk drive speeds are the burst speed – how long it takes to fill or empty the RAM buffer. The spec you need to compare is the sustained speeds. Everything we do in Vegas uses files much larger than the drive RAM buffer.

Hope this helps.

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

[Dave Osbun]

RAID is a great asset to a video editing workstation. With a RAID 0 configuration (also known as ‘striping’), your system will have better performance (if you are using better quality/faster hard drives) since the data will be written to both drives simultaneously. The only downside is if one of those drives fail, then your data

Intel i5 3570K Ivy Bridge 3.40GHz quad core
Asus P8Z77V-LK
16gb RAM
ATI Radeon HD7850 2gb
Crucial M4 SSD + Seagate Barricuda 7200rpm
Windows 7 Pro 64

[John Rofrano]

[Jay Allen] “Does Vegas pro 12 support 2 cpu’s”

As Stephen pointed out, Vegas will use all the cores you can throw at it but the OS will need to support multiple CPU’s.

[Jay Allen] “Would i be better off with quadro k5000 or two quadro 4000’s”

I’m guessing that the Quadro K5000 with 1536 CUDA cores will outperform two Quadro 4000’s with only 256 CUDA cores each. I also thought I read that Vegas Pro will only take advantage of the first GPU so having two cards might not benefit Vegas Pro at all.

[Jay Allen] “Any caveats to know about SSD’s… using for boot and scratch drive”

They are fine for boot and scratch drives but SSD’s have a limited number of write cycles so they will wear out faster as a scratch drive than a boot drive.

[Jay Allen] “Has anyone used 4tb drives in raid”

I’ve used 3TB drives to make a 9TB CineRAID CR-H458 RAID 5 (4 x Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3TB IntelliPower SATA 6.0Gb/s ) and I’m quite happy with it.

[Jay Allen] “Has anyone used drobo with thunderbolt”

Not me and I have also heard that Drobo’s are slow.

Here is my latest build:

Intel Hex Core Video Editing Workstation

~jr

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

[Stephen Mann]

I also thought I read that Vegas Pro will only take advantage of the first GPU

John, this is correct. I forgot it until you replied. I have two display adapters in my system so that I can run four screens, but Vegas only sees one.

Just a side note – if you run multiple GPU cards, do yourself a favor and use two identical boards. This way you only have ONE display driver installed.

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

[Stephen Mann]

Dave, as I’ve said in the past, RAID adds nothing to the performance of the editing most of us do. If you are working with uncompressed source video or 4K, then RAID is overkill. If you need the security of RAID, then use RAID5.

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

[John Rofrano]

Steve that’s good to know. Perhaps it was one of your posts that I read it on. 😉

~jr

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

[Dave Haynie]

[Jay Allen] “Does Vegas pro 12 support 2 cpu’s

Sure… Vegas supports as many cores as you can give it. It doesn’t really care if they’re in the same CPU or two different packages — that’s Windows’ job to worry about.

[Jay Allen] Would i be better off with quadro k5000 or two quadro 4000’s
A Quadro is pretty much overkill for anything video. The main point of the professional series is higher quality rendering for things like mechanical CAD. You can get the same or better performance on OpenCL/CUDA, I think, with an much lower cost GeForce card.

However, if you’re set on a Quadro, keep in mind that Vegas, at least currently, can only use one OpenCL device at a time. So in a dual card setup, only one will be making Vegas go faster, at least via OpenCL… maybe a dual card would make OpenGL stuff render faster. OpenGL is used in some plugins, but it’s rarely a bottleneck.

[Jay Allen] Any caveats to know about SSD’s… using for boot and scratch drive
They’re too small. They’re dandy as a boot drive, if you don’t have much software to install. They’d make a fine scratch drive, too, other than the fact they’re too small. Of course, you’re talking to a guy with a 2TB boot drive, a 3TB data drive, another 2TB drive currently in the SATA slot (lets you use a SATA drive like a cartridge), and a 12TB Drobo.

[Jay Allen] Has anyone used 4tb drives in raid
Sure someone has, but not me. I’d double-check that the RAID you’re interested in supports 4TB drives. My Drobo has 3TB drives in it. Never a problem.

[Jay Allen] Has anyone used drobo with thunderbolt”

Again, not I. I have an older one, which supports USB 2.0 and Firewire 800… thus, all the internal SATA drives. This is a reliable drive for storing all my past projects, but it’s not what you’d call overly fast. I’d check out benchmarks on the newer Drobos… they have upgraded the CPUs, but they may still not be terribly fast. The new models support either Thunderbolt and USB3.0 or GigE…. I’d really have to think that one through. Or get really rich and buy one of each, as an upgrade. I suppose you have to decide if you’re thinking “NAS” or just a PC-add-on. The TB/USB drive will certainly be faster, at least if the CPU can keep up. And now these are all five slot drives I think, versus my four slot drive.

Another thing… if you’re buying drives separately from the Drobo, order them from different retailers. Usually, RAID systems want perfectly matched drives, but Drobos don’t care. That eliminates one of the big problems with RAID: perfectly matched drives from the same lot can also have perfectly matched failures. When a drive fails in the Drobo (or you swap out an smaller one to expand), it takes some time to reform the RAID… a couple of days, these days. So that’s a window in which a second drive failure would be a really bad thing (well, ok, some of the newer units allow for two drives to fail, but you’re losing all that much more storage for that additional redundancy).

And of course, RAID != Archive. You still need to make backups… my favorite media these days are HDDs and HTL Blu-ray discs. Maybe I’d use some online service if I had real broadband (on satellite) and wasn’t talking about many TB of back needed.

-Dave