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OT: How should I allocate my four internal drive bays?
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Yes, that all sound accurate (including the previous posts just prior to this). In looking at your original screen shots (the first batch) I saw that my post was inaccurate, and that you did have a C and D drive. My error. As to the pre-render location, my guess on proper useage would be that if you have lots of drive space on C, and don’t have another location to put this job in, then yes, use C (I do, and I don’t have a speed problem, yet). However, if I was looking for maximum speed of rendering, I think I would assume that I would want prerendering done on a separate drive than my OS and program files.
It would be great to see a white paper from Sony’s engineering staff recommending the ideal configuration for raw speed, best protection fo data, or least expensive setup (one or two non-raided drives). I assume the default setup is simply the most common setup for the bulk of users, and they allow you to change it as needed.
I routinely watch ResMon to see how Vegas is using my system. I don’t watch it the whole time, but like to keep track of things that change. Watching the four cores handle the streams is very interesting, in that it’s not uniform. It’s very different than seeing the same video streams operate in FCP. It’s my belief that Vegas is handling the multicores more efficiently than Apple does. That doesn’t surprise me in that it seems to be more “64 bit” than FCP is currently. I have no experience with Adobe in this regards. Reviews seem to be not getting to this level of performance. And of course, if you need plug ins, you might be running 32 bit, which seems to be having more than it’s share of problems lately.
Alf
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>>It would be great to see a white paper from Sony’s engineering staff recommending the ideal configuration for raw speed, best protection fo data, or least expensive setup (one or two non-raided drives). I assume the default setup is simply the most common setup for the bulk of users, and they allow you to change it as needed.
That’s a great idea. I just wrote to Sony Product Suggestions. I also put Project Properties > Pre-rendered to D:\Temp. We’ll see if that seems to help some. In this case it might not, since C:\ is in RAID 0 (at least for now), but in the future, when C:\ is just a standalone 7200 RPM spin, it should help.
>>And of course, if you need plug ins, you might be running 32 bit, which seems to be having more than it’s share of problems lately.
I am running x32, as I do tend to like Sony Noise Reduction, which only runs under x32 right now. I am eager for Sony to re-write Noise Reduction for x64, so I can take full advantage of all of that RAM.
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
I’ve read of people loading both 32x and 64x on their machines and running 32x for their plug ins. I’m not yet needing much in the way of plug ins, so have not confronted the issue. 32x on Windows 64 seems to be having way more problems than the 64 bit version. We should all be sending requests to the plug in makers that we use to get their upgrades done. And then buy them when they do!
Alf
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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?Yup. Sounds like a plan to me. 😉
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
It would be great to see a white paper from Sony’s engineering staff recommending the ideal configuration for raw speed, best protection fo data, or least expensive setup (one or two non-raided drives). I assume the default setup is simply the most common setup for the bulk of users, and they allow you to change it as needed.
They kind of have when they announced the Vegas Pro Master Suite Systems. You can see the configurations they are selling and extrapolate from that. The Extreme has a 1TB System Drive, 1TB Data Drive, and (2) 300GB 15K SAS Data Drives. No mention of RAID anywhere but since the system does not have an SDI card, there really is no need for a RAID.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
The RAID 5 is something I’m considering. It would double my current 2TB’s of storage to 4TB and give me redundancy and I can still partition as D: and E: to keep my stock footage separate from my editing work. I will just get less performance than my RAID 0 but still should be better than a single non-RAID drive.
John, I am researching RAID 5. It is a little different than what I expected. It appears that while RAID 5 can be a very quick reader, it can also be very slow in writing, under some circumstances.
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/ou/comprehensive-raid-performance-report/484
Can you tell from the article if four 7200 RPM spin HDD’s in RAID 5 would be able to write fast enough to handle three streams of AVCHD and some FX?
And also, how does Vegas work? If one has multiple streams of AVCHD and FX, does Vegas still only need to write slowly, in that while the CPU may need to pull from multiple locations, it only has to write to one?
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
Can you tell from the article if four 7200 RPM spin HDD’s in RAID 5 would be able to write fast enough to handle three streams of AVCHD and some FX?
AVCHD is almost half the bandwidth of SD DV (16Mbps vs 25Mbps) so it is not I/O bound. You don’t need a RAID for AVCHD so any RAID will do. Although writing to RAID 5 is slower, I thought it was still faster than a single drive. I’ll have to do more research on that.
And also, how does Vegas work? If one has multiple streams of AVCHD and FX, does Vegas still only need to write slowly, in that while the CPU may need to pull from multiple locations, it only has to write to one?
Yes. Render is writing one single stream regardless of how many tracks/streams are in your project. You will probably never be I/O bound rendering AVCHD as the CPU is the bottleneck.
BTW, if you are planning to edit multi-camera AVCHD have you tried it already? I don’t think it will be possible (too taxing on the CPU). You should plan on converting your AVCHD to Cineform or some other intermediary that can be edited more smoothly.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
>>Although writing to RAID 5 is slower, I thought it was still faster than a single drive. I’ll have to do more research on that.
I just got off of tech chat with Dell, and they confirmed that while RAID 5 reads very quickly it does write more slowly than a single drive. Apparently the CPU has to work hard to ‘distribute parity’ (i.e., decide what information gets written where). It takes maybe 36% of a quad core; so even if the RAID 5 array might write fast enough, the additional load on the CPU would be a bad thing, as the CPU is already the bottleneck in my system.
They recommended RAID 10. It won’t be as big an array as RAID 5, but it should still be big enough, and it won’t tax the processor nearly as much.
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
>>BTW, if you are planning to edit multi-camera AVCHD have you tried it already? I don’t think it will be possible (too taxing on the CPU). You should plan on converting your AVCHD to Cineform or some other intermediary that can be edited more smoothly.
Yeah, sorry if I was not clear. I am always converting to Cineform .avi. I just meant that that AVCHD was the original source (as opposed to 5DM2 or P2).
I was able to render successfully to MPEG-2 (the right size file), and now I just have to find time to learn DVDA, so I can burn the first project to disk. But then I am thinking about cutting over to RAID 10 before I begin the second project.
Thanks for your help.
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
I just got off of tech chat with Dell, and they confirmed that while RAID 5 reads very quickly it does write more slowly than a single drive
Wow, I hadn’t realized that. I guess it would be good for archive footage that is read mostly.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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