New PC Configuaration for Vegas

[Doug Graham]

No, no…you should have a separate hard drive, apart from your RAID, on which to put Vegas and other software.

The RAID should be used only for A/V data storage. For example, my computer has one hard drive for the operating system and application programs, a second hard drive for non-video data (stock audio clips, graphics, project files, correspondence, etc.), and a RAID 0 array consisting of four 300 GB hard drives.

I use the RAID both to store captured video, and to render edited projects to. There is some debate as to whether it would be faster to actually have TWO RAID arrays, or at least two separate drives…one for captured video, and the second for rendering out to.

Regards,
Doug Graham

[Terje A. bergesen]

As Doug says, you should use a non-raid HD for your operating system and your applications. I’d recommend you also store other data on this HD, such as documents etc. You should then have one set of drives for video, and RAID0 those.

There are a few things you should be aware of when it comes to RAID. Particularly RAID0. You might have heard that RAID may improve speed and also improve reliability. It typically can’t do both at the same time. Using, for example, RAID5, you will get reliability. If one harddrive crashes, the data will still be intact, and you can just swap it for another drive and you should be fine. RAID5 is not a good idea for video though, since it slows the drives down, quite a lot in fact in my experience. This is because you have to write 50% more to the disks using RAID5, and even SATA is quite slow. Using SCSI you might not see the same slow-down for various reasons.

A good RAID configuration for video is RAID0. In RAID0 data is written across multiple disks. Sounds good. Makes it faster. There is a danger however. If one of your RAID0 disks go out. ALL data on ALL disks is (probably) irrevocably gone. That is worth thinking about. I have 3 250G drives set up in a big RAID0 configuration, and I put nothing on that drive that I can not afford to lose.

So. Don’t put anything you can’t live without on the RAID0 drive. I even put my .veg files on my other drive and back that drive up.

If you have a good backup solution for your RAID’ed drive, this of course is not an issue. I don’t know of any good backup solutions for my 700+G drive, so I put stuff on there that must be fast but that can easily be retrieved from my tapes or elsewhere.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Jim Prisby]

Thanks for all the great responses. However, wouldn’t it be best to put captured AVI files on a non Raid 0 drive? When rendering with those files aren’t they being read? It seems that the Raid drives should only be doing the writing for maximum speed.
Because of the risk of lost data on the Raid drives I would think they would only be used to write the rendered files to because of the speed increase and not store any other files on them. Even the rendered files could be transferred to another drive after the rendering was complete.
Does anyone know the percentage of speed increase when using Raid 0 VS a non Raid drive?

[Terje A. bergesen]

I have no problem putting my captured files on the RAID drive given that they are safe on my tapes anywho.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Jim Prisby]

Terje,
My point was that having to read and write from the Raid 0 drives would slow down the rendering speed.

[Terje A. bergesen]

Not at all, quite the opposite. RAID 0 is faster for both reads and writes. Speed is why you use RAID 0.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Jim Prisby]

Terje,
Let me say this another way…the reason you put the OS and Vegas on a separate drive from the Raid 0 drive you are rendering files to is because the rendering will be faster since it reads from the Vegas drive and writes to the Raid 0 drive. If captured AVI files are on the Raid 0 drive then it has to read and then write from the same drive, namely the Raid 0 drive, thereby slowing down the rendering. At least this is what I understand. Therefore you wouldn’t want the AVI files on the Raid drive. Can someone else confirm this?
Thanks

[Ron Shook]

Surfer,

[surferj45] “If captured AVI files are on the Raid 0 drive then it has to read and then write from the same drive, namely the Raid 0 drive, thereby slowing down the rendering.”

You are worrying about a non-problem. Rendering is a CPU intensive operation that is little effected by drive speed, particularly a raid 0 drive speed. If you want to render faster, get faster CPUs. Since the CPU that you have is about as fast as it gets, the only way to make it significantly faster in Vegas is to go to multiple, multiple core CPUs like Xeons. Honker hard drive arrays are for servicing real-time playback of multiple streams of video, particularly uncompressed streams. A single drive will keep up with most complex rendering even if it has to do both I and O, but your real-time preview could suffer with just a single drive pulling multiple streams at once. So you have a Raid 0 array of 2-4 drives to help you with the real-time preview of your editing, but it won’t do much at all for your rendering.

Ron Shook

[Terje A. bergesen]

As Ron says, rendering is CPU intensive, not disk intensive. There is no reason to render from one drive to another. Any drive, RAID or not will be able to keep up with the process.

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Terje A. Bergesen

[Jim Prisby]

This is a slightly different twist on my understanding of the way to use the Raid 0 drives. I know that the CPU controls the speed of rendering but adding to that process is writing the rendered files to a hard drive. You seem to be saying that it doesn’t really matter what hard drive you write to. My understanding is that you want to write to Raid 0 drives because it does speed up the complete render process by writing the rendered files faster.
I can understand that the Raid 0 drives would also be good for real time previews, which raises another question…If you mean by real time preview, playing the edited video events on the time line and watching it in the preview window, then how do I set real time previews to run on the Raid 0 drives in Vegas 7 as you are suggesting?