Optimal Setup for Hard Drives for Video Editing & Design

[Stephen Mann]

You are on the right track of separating your O/S from your applications. The idea is that you don’t want your disk drive, by far the slowest peripheral in our PC’s, serve two masters. With that thinking, having a separate drive for your assets is smart.

Here’s how mine works:
Internal: Primary drive is divided into two partitions (yes, I said partitions – I am a vocal opponent to partitioning which is an artifact from the days that hard disks were getting bigger than DOS could address). The first partition is the boot partition, and the second partition is the Windows 7 System Backup partition. Secondary drive is where I put the “My Documents” and temp folders.
Externally: I use USB Docking Ports for everything else. Terabyte drives are relatively cheap, and I just dedicate a physical drive to a single project. Each project gets its own drive.

Steve

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

[Nigel O’neill]

Ryan

Here’s an extract of an article I wrote for an amateur movie making club (Queensland Movie Makers or QMM):

Given the fall in disk prices, there is no excuse to not take advantage of low prices and high capacities. A video editing PC should have at least 3 hard drives:
• C: – contains your operating system and programs
• G: – contains your video captures/project files
• H: – contains your output files

By splitting the workload across drives, you can improve performance having one disk read whilst the other writes. An improvement to the above set up could be to have 5 drives in your PC as
follows:
•1 x HDD: C: – contains your operating system and programs
•2 x HDD (RAID 1 mirror): G: – contains your video captures/project files
•2 x HDD (RAID 0 stripe): H: – contains your output files

I leave D: and E: drive letters alone as some commercial DVD’s or software CD’s insist that the media must be on those drive letters, and will not work otherwise.

Unfortunately, software RAID is only offered in Windows XP Professional, but you can buy dedicated RAID controllers or motherboards with hardware RAID which your PC builder can set up for you. Hardware RAID offers better performance, but if your motherboard develops a fault, you need to have an
identical board to access the data. Software RAID provided by Windows is slower, but is transferable across hardware.

The benefit of mirroring is that you can have 2 drives working independently on the same task, with the added benefit of their combined performance. A RAID 1 mirror creates a copy of your
drive, and should one fail, you still have a backup on a second hard drive. The drawback is that 2 x 320GB HDD‘s combined in a mirror will result in you seeing only one 320GB (approx) drive in total in
Windows Explorer.

RAID 0 on the other hand, combines (stripes) the two drives to give you 640 GB (approx) in total for excellent write performance, but the drawback is that if one of the drives fails, the data on both drives is lost for good. If it is used only as an output drive for your renders, then you should theoretically be able to regenerate your output from the RAID 1 mirror drives.

As a general guide, RAID 1 is good for reading from, whilst RAID 0 is good for both reading and writing, but with no data protection.

It is possible to install 5 or more HDD‘s in your PC and set up RAID 5 in which all your data is constantly protected, but you will only have the benefit of the capacity of 3 drives, as the equivalent of 1 is used to maintain parity, whilst 1 is offline as a hot spare. There are a number of other RAID configurations, which a Google search on ”wiki RAID‘ will give you all you ever need to know about RAID, and then some.

I would recommend against using USB docking ports as suggested by Steve (no offence intended Steve) unless you are using them for backup purposes only. Unless you have USB 3.0, USB 2.0 data transfer rates are quite slow. I do like Steve’s suggestion of an external drive caddy, but would use eSATA. eSATA drives do have good transfer rates and you can edit/render off them. Personally, I use an internal SATA caddy and swap my project drives in and out.

If you are a commercial editor, you can give an entire copy of the project to your client on an inexpensive SATA drive. If they want changes done 6-12 months later, you just need the drive back and can pick up where you left off. Of course, you will need to have your client sign an agreement so they don’t take your work elsewhere… .

Lastly, my main challenge when setting this up was finding a good motherboard that had sufficient SATA ports. I added an existing Promise Controller I had for another 2 SATA drives).

Hope this helps.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Stephen Mann]

RAID is completely unnecessary.

Also, you can use the DOS command “subst” to change any drive’s letter assignment.

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

[Nigel O’neill]

Unnecessary for you but I definitely get measurable performance and redundancy benefits. Each to his own.

Intel i920, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 9 (X64), Vista x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S 4.1

[Stephen Mann]

Where are you seeing performance improvements? If you are editing DC, HDV or AVCHD, then any 7200RPM SATA disk and most USB 2.0 External disks can easily keep up with the 25Mb/sec data rate, reading or writing.

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

[Ryan Taylor]

Thank you very much to both of you. This is incredibly helpful!

I really like the idea of the dedicated HD for each project. My PC has eSata support, so that will work out nicely.

I’m guessing on the second drive (drive G in your case), this would be the best place to put other files, such as mp3s, pdfs and Word documents? Or maybe that really doesn’t that matter too much.

I’m not sure if programs use a scratch disk too much any more, but if so is there an optimal drive to set the scratch disk, temp files and cache?

Thank you again.

Ryan

[Norman Willis]

I want to recreate D:\ as a standalone single drive and recreate D:\ as five drives in RAID 5, and then put all stock footage, Temp and output files to D:\.

I realize this is a subjective question, but is there a better setup?

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org

[Norman Willis]

>>I want to recreate D:\ as a standalone single drive and recreate D:\ as five drives in RAID 5, and then put all stock footage, Temp and output files to D:\.

I apologize. I should clarify. I have six drive bays. I can drop one of my optical drives, and make C:\ as a standalone (with external backup), and D:\ as RAID 5 with four (not five) drives. Or I can get an external enclosure for my remaining optical drive, and I can make D:\ as five drives in RAID 5.

Would four drives in RAID 5 be good enough for D:\, both for stock footage, for D:\Temp, and for output? Because it would be easier to leave the optical drive inside the case.

Or is there a better setup altogether.

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org

[Stephen Mann]

“I’m not sure if programs use a scratch disk too much any more, but if so is there an optimal drive to set the scratch disk, temp files and cache?”

Yes, they do. But they use the DOS environment variable for “temp” or “tmp” rather than a discrete disk.

Moving your TMP folders to another drive can also provide a small (very small) improvement in performance. (Under Control Panel, System, Advanced…)

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

[Norman Willis]

>>If you are editing DC, HDV or AVCHD, then any 7200RPM SATA disk and most USB 2.0 External disks can easily keep up with the 25Mb/sec data rate, reading or writing.

Steve, I am looking at RAID 5 for the redundancy aspect. If one had a hard drive crash, it would be nice not to lose data. If one has multiple tracks and FX, does one still only need 25MBps regardless of the FX used, because Vegas only reads one thing at a time?

The reason I ask is that it appears that while RAID 5 can be a very quick reader, it can also be very slow in writing. So I would need to find out if four disks in RAID 5 could reliably write 25 MBps.

Does that sound like the right question to be asking?

Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org