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OT: How should I allocate my four internal drive bays?
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As to the Perfmon (Resource) counters Norman, one thing to think about is that it seems you are running C drive with your OS, your App and apparently your data too? That is a recipe for a slow playback, since your OS is in contention for your drive when your playback is trying to use the drive too. You need to move the data to an external drive. (If I missed something earlier on in the thread, I apologize).
On a multicore machine, you should see the multiple cores in use, and remember that Windows is a multithreaded OS and as such, it does it’s own prioritization of the processing being done. Certain OS level events will always take precedence. You should see Windows taking advantage of all the cores you have as Vegas should be written to let Windows manage that task, but it won’t necessarily be spread evenly across all cores. I have seen my cores act at different amounts during rendering and playback. Hard to be definitive, I think. Memory should not be showing Hard Faults. The blue line you ask about is Maximum frequency I believe, which is showing how much of the GHz of the clock you are using. Nothing to worry about. It should be higher than the CPU utilization, I do believe.
There is a lot to Resource Monitor. You should go to the Microsoft Technet Site and see about finding an article on it.
Alf
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Is there any way to determine just how much of a bottleneck the CPU is, vis-a-vis the RAID 0 data array? I just opened up Task Manager and Resource Monitor and let Vegas play through the timeline. All four cores were hovering at about 85-90%, while the hard drive usage said 14%. Can that possibly be right?
Yup, that sounds about right. If you are working with HD, chances are the CPU is definitely the bottleneck unless you are using uncompressed footage. HDV has the same data rate as DV (13GB/hr) so there is no need for a RAID to work with HDV. AVCHD has even a lower data rate and file size per hr. You only “need” a RAID if you are working with very large data rates or uncompressed video. I have a RAID 0 to make copying large files faster. It does not affect my editing at all.
I guess my question is if I need 7200 RPM spins for D:\, or if 5900 RPM will do it. They have 2TB 5900 RPM spin drives out for $109.00 right now, which is a really great price. If one was to put three of those in RAID 5, one would have 4TB of storage. But how could one know if those are fast enough not to cause a bottleneck?
If you are working with HD you really need 7200RPM drives. You also don’t want to put “reduced power” drives into a RAID. (e.g. WD “GREEN” drives) This is because they spin down to save power but may not spin back up fast enough and cause the RAID controller to report a failure.
I have Enterprise Class drives in my RAID 0 that are rated for RAID arrays. A RAID is not something you should put “cheap” drives into. So, while all the 1TB WD drives were $99, I bought the $149 Enterprise class 1TB drives (check the part numbers in my previous post). Lots of people use inexpensive drives in a RAID and it works for them. I just wouldn’t do it. Your mileage may vary. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
The resource monitor is changing scales on you. Look at the top photo in your previous post and all of the others. In the top photo and in this one above the Disk says 10 MB/sec while the other photos say Disk 100MB/sec. So it was using a smaller scale for lower activity and then switched to a larger scale which is why the green dropped to the bottom only taking up 10% of the graph.
What those middle shots show is that while your CPU’s are at 100% your drives are at about 10% which confirms that HD playback is CPU bound as it decodes the video and applies all of the FX.
If you are looking for performance improvement in Vegas… a RAID is not going to give that to you. It will, however, give you an overall boost in performance for any disc i/o activity on your PC in general, and give you redundancy against drive failure. So loading projects may get faster, but playback will be the same.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
John, why are you running Raid 0? Raid 0 is not mirrored, meaning that you are getting performance, and extended size, but no redundancy…a single failure will take down your RAID entirely.
The need for speed. What’s the difference if I buy a single 1TB drive that could fail or I RAID two 500GB drives into a 1TB drive that could fail? I don’t see it as any different. Yes, I know that two mechanical devices are more likely to fail than one mechanical device but I upgrade my drives every 2 – 3 years to larger ones and I use Enterprise Class drives which have a longer MTBF. All I want is speed. I use backup programs for backup. I’m not a bank. I don’t need 24/7 resilience. I need to copy large HD files as fast as I can.
It would seem like you should be running Raid 1 at a minimum, which at least is creating a mirrored set. That way if one disk goes down, you carry on with the good one. You lose performance, but gain backup automatically.
That would be worse. RAID 1 is slower than a single drive. I wanted speed. RAID 1 doesn’t give me that. Also, I started using RAID back when 1TB drives didn’t exist. So my 2 x 500GB was larger than any single drive could give me and larger than RAID 1 would give me. RAID 0 gave me speed and larger capacity than a single drive could at the time.
RAID 5, as I understand it, creates a parity disk. You need 3 disks minimum to implement RAID 5. Correct? Failure of one drive does not require immediate replacement of the defective drive.
Yes, RAID 5 needs a minimum of 3 drives but it doesn’t create a parity disc. It spreads the parity across the 3 drives. You still have to immediately replace the defective drive. You just don’t loose any data. The RAID can rebuild it from the parity information on the other two discs. RAID 5 is not as fast as a RAID 0 but faster than a RAID 1 with RAID 1 redundancy.
Lot’s of people are moving to RAID 10 (which is really 1+0). It is a mirrored RAID 1 pair of RAID 0 drives and can withstand two drive failures but it also eats up 2 drives of space so four 1TB drives only gives you 2TB of usable RAID 10 space while the same four 1TB drives gives you 3TB of RAID 5 space. I just feel that RAID 10 overkill for me.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Thanks for clarifying. Right, if all you want is speed, then RAID 0 is a logical choice. And enterprise drives are the right choice for that.
I did err in my blathering when I said a parity disk, obviously the Parity is spread across all drives in the array.
I use RAID 1 so I won’t have to backup as frequently. I store the original footage I offload onto a RAID 1 array, and burn the same data to Blu Ray so I can take it offsite to my storage box at my bank. I do this because there were some high profile thefts by Meth heads in Seattle last year where they stole the equipment of graphic artists. Emptied the entire office at one theft. I decided to protect against that by taking everything offsite as much as possible, until cloud services are faster. I then buy a second 1 TB drive and store all changed data on that as local backup in the event of a catastrophic RAID failure, which *shouldn’t* happen, but… I don’t store anything but OS and Program files on my C drive, and so if I lose that I simply reload the unchanging bits. I’ve even thought of loading the Vegas program on it’s own drive, but not sure that would help. Do you know?
I don’t use RAID 0 because I think, maybe erroneously, that drives are fast enough now that I don’t need the hassle for the slightly faster throughput? Maybe I should do some real analysis of this…I assume you are actually seeing dramatically better improvements in speed, from your post.
Alf
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Not that it’ll help in any way with Vegas rendering times, but those who only put OS and program files on their C drive might want to look into the faster solid state drives for that purpose. It’s nice having a system drive that doesn’t generate a lot of heat and has no moving parts to worry about, and programs load up real quick. Just food for thought. Obviously the cost per gigabyte and speed aren’t going to match RAID for video editing.
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John, Alf, lots of great information.
>>If you are working with HD, chances are the CPU is definitely the bottleneck unless you are using uncompressed footage. HDV has the same data rate as DV (13GB/hr) so there is no need for a RAID to work with HDV. AVCHD has even a lower data rate and file size per hr. You only “need” a RAID if you are working with very large data rates or uncompressed video. I have a RAID 0 to make copying large files faster. It does not affect my editing at all.
OK, so if I understood all that, both C:\ and D:\ could be simple standalone 7200 RPM spin drives, even with two streams of AVCHD (as in the above test). Is that right? And it should also handle a single stream of Canon 5D MkII footage (converted to Cineform .avi), since the 5D2 records at about 20GB/hr?
So I don’t need a new case and PSU. With my four existing drive bays I can just make C:\ as a standalone drive, backing up to an external USB drive (as now), and put the remaining three drive bays in RAID 5, and I’m good?
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
Hi Alf. Thanks for the pointers.
>>As to the Perfmon (Resource) counters Norman, one thing to think about is that it seems you are running C drive with your OS, your App and apparently your data too? That is a recipe for a slow playback, since your OS is in contention for your drive when your playback is trying to use the drive too. You need to move the data to an external drive.
Maybe I’m still getting this messed up. I do have the OS and Vegas on C:\, but what is it about the screen shots that leads you to believe I have the data on C:\?
The Data is placed in D:\MyVideos\(Current Project Folder), and that is the location I specify in the Vegas Explorer window.
I also have Options > Preferences > General Preferences set to D:\MyVideos\(Current Project Folder).
However, in Project Properties I do have the Prerendered Files Folder on the default C:\Users\MyComputer\AppData\Local\Sony\Vegas Pro\9.0. Is that wrong? I have set that to D:\Temp in the past. Should I put it back to D:\Temp?
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
>>So I don’t need a new case and PSU. With my four existing drive bays I can just make C:\ as a standalone drive, backing up to an external USB drive (as now), and put the remaining three drive bays in RAID 5, and I’m good?
What I mean is, I can make C:\ a single 1TB 7200 RPM spin drive and back that up to an external USB drive,
and then make D:\ as a RAID 5 array from three 7200 RPM spin drives, and back up all of the projects to external USB drives, and I should be covered?Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
Hi Alf.
>>I use RAID 1 so I won’t have to backup as frequently. I store the original footage I offload onto a RAID 1 array, and burn the same data to Blu Ray so I can take it offsite to my storage box at my bank.
Do you have both C:\ and D:\ in RAID 1?
Also, given the cost of Blu-Ray disks, have you priced the option of backing up to external USB drives, and perhaps taking those to your bank box? I don’t have any attachment to what you do, but when I priced it, it came out way cheaper to back up to external USB.
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org
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