Terje A. bergesen
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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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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 -
I am a little curious here. Why have you configured your computer for RAID1, if that is indeed what you have done.
Just a little technical info. ATA and SATA requires a lot of help from the PC and CPU it self when storing data, not like SCSI where the controller and the disk takes care of most of the work, leaving the CPU free to do other stuff. If you are familiar with gaming etc, it is similar to video cards. With a good video card, even a moderately slow PC can do fancy graphics stuff, simply because most of the fancy graphics is done by the card, not the CPU. With a poor GPU, the CPU has to do more of the graphics work. SCSI is like a fast graphics card for writing to disk, (S)ATA is like a slow, cheap one. SATA is a little better if it supports command queueing, but just a little.
Now, if you are using RAID1, you are using mirroring. This means that all data must be written twice to the disks. Given the fact that the controller isn’t all that much help, this probably means that it takes almost twice as long (it could even be more if the PC is under load, like when you are rendering) to write anything to disk. In other words, if you are using RAID1 your rendering is probably going to be slooooooooow.
When you use RAID in video apps, you want to stick with RAID0 or, as an alternative that is a little better than RAID1, RAID5.
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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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I’ll add my support for B&H, this is probably the only New York based camera dealer you should deal with online 🙂 Good service. Fast. Reputeble.
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No
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A piece of software must be written to take full advantage of multi core chips, but should not have to be modified (at all if reasonably written) to take advantage of quad core if it already takes advantage of a dual core chip. Vegas can utilize a dual core chip, and should therefore be able to utilize a quad core chip just fine.
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Terje A. Bergesen -
Render as AVI, chose the DivX codec.
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The “DVD Authoring with DVD Architect” by Gary Kleiner is good.
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It seems to me that the WMV renderer doesn’t use multiple threads when rendering your video, therefore not taking advantage of the fact that you have two CPUs. The 40% CPU usage points in that direction anyway.
Open the CPU measure and check what the CPU usage of both the CPUs are, I am willing to bet that one of them is not as active as the other.
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Terje A. Bergesen