SATA and Render Time

[Chris Smith]

I think you may notice a very subtle difference when using SD video. But I think it would be almost imperceptable unless you had a long render time. But an average drive has just enough speed to play uncompressed video in realtime with a choke here and there. Whereas a 2 drive raid can play realtime uncompressed SD just fine. I could be off a ways, but I’m gonna say the speed difference in relation to processor time for the actual render would change less than 2% per frame if you used a 2 drive RAID. But so much of it is relative.

Chris Smith
https://www.sugarfilmproduction.com

[Michael Duff]

i just updated my single SATA drive to two SATA drives striped, with an IDE for system files. I cannot notice a difference at all. I have not actually tested the difference in render times, but I’d say it is very very small. The difference are more in the editing side of things. I can play all my edits in PPro with no lagging. Also can play large files (animation codec) without jittering.

[Joeythedog]

My single sata drive plays uncompressed avi’s perfectly smooth.

[Phil In dk]

With a Raid you need to do it in hardware.
Software Raids won’t really help your problem much, as they need lots of CPU cycles to control the raid.
(Which you need for your render)

Hardware raids are best because they do the administration. Look at the different controllers out there and you’ll see that they come in various quality and price. You kinda get what you pay for. A good controller will get you the disk performance you need without eating all your CPU power.

It’s also dependent an the 4:2:2 aquisition codec as to how much ‘uncompressed’ is. Check

https://www.lurkertech.com/lg/big/howbig.html

All Sata 150’s in theory should be able to spit at least 3 uncomp layers out, but you’ll never get that performance because of lots of other factors.