How Many Drives Do I Need?

J

Joe_Hicks

Well-known member
I'm in the process of building a new system for DV editing using Premiere. I'm somewhat stuck at the hard drive crossroads. (Without getting into the drive failure of RAID) I hear RAID 0 is the way to go, others say that RAID 0 is overkill for DV, that SATA drives are more than sufficient and will not bottleneck.
Is RAID 0 overkill?

As well, how many drives. Adobe suggests that optimally I should have separate drives for captured video, captured audio, video previews (I assume this is the scratch drive), audio previews, and conformed audio. This seems like major overkill. Can anyone shed some light from their personal experience or knowledge.

Thx-
 
One System Drive
Two Media Drives in a Raid 0

You could get by with less, but this should provide great performance without getting too crazy. I would go with SATA no matter what configuration you settle on.
 
I ended up going with a RAID 5 setup (min. 3 drives) - since HD are so cheap - that's the direction I went with....if one drive fails, i'm able to rebuild with a new drive - SATA all the way. I think I recently saw 250 gig drives for as little as $50 - $60 bucks with rebates
 
Hi Joe,
For DV editing, separate drives for each data type seems like way overkill to me. I have a Athlon64 3000+ system with 2 gigs of memory and IDE and SATA drives. I have Windows-XP on an IDE drive to keep installation simple. The SATA drives I use in a non-raid (jbod) config for video projects. I usually keep all the files associated with a particular project on the same SATA drive. My largest project so far filled a 250 gig drive.

With this setup, I get very fast and smooth response with PPro 1.5 without going to raid or seperate disks. That is UNTIL I start applying certain filter/effects. In particular, I commonly use the (relatively) new all-in-one CC filter. Once I apply this filter, I no longer have smooth playback on the timeline. However, I thnk that has more to do with CPU speed than disk I/O speed. Same goes for rendering. The drive activity light is never on solid when I'm rendering so I don't think I'm disk I/O bound. My next h/w upgrade will be in the CPU area.

Like seejay and dewman, I like SATA drives. They're inexpensive, perform well, and provide a lot of configuration options. From what I've seen is that most MBs that support SATA use raid controllers. So you can later change from a jbod to a raid configuration if you think you need it.
-dan
 
Hi Joe,

I have a great DV system for sale - http://www.dvxuser.com/V3/showthread.php?t=43221 if your interested. Sorry for hijackibng the thread a bit.

Re: how many hard drives, you should always have seperate drives where you store application data whenever possible, for several reasons. One is that system disks can often get scrambled or currupted when loading plug-ins, new applications etc which can cuase you to have to reload your operating system. If your application data is on your system drive your hosed. Secondly, Windows is not a realtime operating system and will interupt the contiguous flow of data while youe editing. Finally not all application data is created equally, I use the higher performance RAIDed drives for streaming video and slower single drives for storing photoshop, Illistrator graphics etc..

Oops, finally again, also cheap drives, like Maxtor, are not a good investment for video editing. [I won't even purchase them anymore]. The data failure rates are too low, they typically run hotter [and for drives heat is bad] and I have them fail too often. As a rule of thumb you can't beat SCSI [usually expensive] or SATA.

Check out the G-RAID for ~7 realtime streams of DV or SATA-RAID for ~3 realtime streams of HD, both from G-Tech http://www.g-technology.com/Products/Products.cfm
 
I agree with ChuckS about not buying the cheapest drives you can find. Yes, SCSI is the best but very expensive compared to SATA. For IDE, I've only bought Western Digital and have never had a drive fail. I still have a 120mbyte (yes, that's megabyte) drive that works.

When I switched to SATA, I did some checking around various forums and Seagate drives seem to always come out on top in terms of reliability. I don't have as many years of personal experience with Seagate but so far so good. Maxtor drives always seem to be one of the worst.

No matter what, keep good backups. Nothing is infallible.

-dan
 
Seagate is great, a little more expensive, but generally worth it. SATA rocks, its about as user friendly as anything I've ever used on a PC. For IDE I too use Western Digital and have never had a problem...

I have seen 500GB WD drives for ~$250. Even as inexpensive as drives are getting you might want to keep in mind that purchasing the "biggest" drive you can get might not be such a good idea. If something where to fail, where your putting that much data on a single drive, recovery can be very time consuming and really depressing.

A freinds G5 "super drive" failed and she hadn't backed it up in over a year, Apple couldn't fix it and since I felt I had nothing to lose I actually used some PC disk utilities to extract the data. She was lucky. That's why I recomend that people run a seperate OS disk, its not becuase reloading the operating system will clobber your data but because sometimes when a problem with the OS occurs it actuall scrambles the file syste, the files where still there but OSX couldn't see them.

Anyway, sorry for the diatribe about disks.
 
TeleDan said:
I agree with ChuckS about not buying the cheapest drives you can find. Yes, SCSI is the best but very expensive compared to SATA. For IDE, I've only bought Western Digital and have never had a drive fail. I still have a 120mbyte (yes, that's megabyte) drive that works.

When I switched to SATA, I did some checking around various forums and Seagate drives seem to always come out on top in terms of reliability. I don't have as many years of personal experience with Seagate but so far so good. Maxtor drives always seem to be one of the worst.
Click to expand...

Ya know, interesting thing, when comparing apples to apples, the scsi drives I don't think are that much more. Recently, Western Digital released their latest version of the Raptor-- 150gb (10K). After researching scsi drives, 10K, 150gb they're both running around the same dollars, depending on where you buy them. Now, I'm sure that because this Raptor is so new, we're paying top dollar. And when you look at scsi drives larger than this they're insane.

I do believe I want to stay with SATA as I think this is where the industry is going to put most of it's efforts (right now anyway- until something new comes along). I'm strongly considering just loading up on this newest 150gb Raptor (74gb for system drive)

Now, if the fastest drive needs to be my scratch drive, or as Adobe puts it, my video preview drive, why would I need to worry about redundancy in a RAID-- after all, that drive will flush when I close my session anyway-- right?
 
For DV your right.

Depending on your editing style you can have contention issues using the same drive for all your source. As your NLE goes through your timeline it is looking ahead for the next clips it needs, depending on how well you manage your drives [defrag etc] windows doesn't always "put" the data on to the drive contiguously which means the drive will thrash performing the "get" look ahead.

There are lots of variables that effect this, how clean you keep your drives [PPro is also not particularly careful how it "puts" the preview files on the disk and will continually add more and more, so there's some occasional house keeping that needs to take place], how much cache/buffer a drive has [more expensive drives usually have more and this help with the seek/reads], and also the rotation speed of the drive. For large contiguous data transfers the faster the drive the better, however, if the data is all over the drive a 10K drive can perform worse than a 7.5K drive that has a larger buffer.

What you should really attempt to do is balance your system with the right mix of drives for your application. SCSI has the headroom, is faster, more reliable but considerably more expensive. IDE is cheap but less reliable and despite the specs from the mfg for video editing there's very little room for error. Sata seems to occupy that nice middle ground between performance and expense. I have only been using the G-SATA for about four months but so far so good.
 
Personally, I'm using a 120GB WD 8MB IDE drive as a system drive for windows and my games, work and other stuff ;) I've got another two Maxtor 250GB SATA 16MB's in RAID 0 for media work...on a 5 minute short i can usually fill up 50gb with ease.....I really need a dual-core athlon 64x2 :D my rig right now is a S754 Athlon 3400+ w/ 2GB OCZ DDR400.

my next rig though will probably be a notebook... centrino duo core T2500 with 2GB DDR2 and a decent video card (6800 or 7800) on a widescreen 14 or 15" with atleast 720p res...so 1280x800 for 16:10 notebooks.
 
TeleDan said:
Hi Joe,
For DV editing, separate drives for each data type seems like way overkill to me. I have a Athlon64 3000+ system with 2 gigs of memory and IDE and SATA drives. I have Windows-XP on an IDE drive to keep installation simple. The SATA drives I use in a non-raid (jbod) config for video projects. I usually keep all the files associated with a particular project on the same SATA drive. My largest project so far filled a 250 gig drive.

With this setup, I get very fast and smooth response with PPro 1.5 without going to raid or seperate disks. That is UNTIL I start applying certain filter/effects. In particular, I commonly use the (relatively) new all-in-one CC filter. Once I apply this filter, I no longer have smooth playback on the timeline. However, I thnk that has more to do with CPU speed than disk I/O speed. Same goes for rendering. The drive activity light is never on solid when I'm rendering so I don't think I'm disk I/O bound. My next h/w upgrade will be in the CPU area.
Click to expand...

This is what I'm trying to get away from-- after applying a few filters, the system slows to a crawl. I use Red Giant a reasonable amount and they are slow as snot. This new system I'm building will incorporate 2 AMD Opteron 254's on a Tyan Thunder mobo (I chose the higher clock single core over the slower clock dual core as I hear they're better for video editing). I'm gonna go with a 7800GT video card as well to pick up that slack-- I can't afford much more than that. This thing's really adding up.
 
ProfessorChaos said:
i'd definately say RAID 0 that setup or 0+1 if u can afford mirroring
Click to expand...

What's faster RAID 0+1 (isn't there a RAID 10 as well) or RAID 5

Also, any recommendations on a SATA RAID controller card- If I'm gonna go this far I'll go ahead and get a card with it's own processor.
 
Joe_Hicks said:
This is what I'm trying to get away from-- after applying a few filters, the system slows to a crawl. I use Red Giant a reasonable amount and they are slow as snot. This new system I'm building will incorporate 2 AMD Opteron 254's on a Tyan Thunder mobo (I chose the higher clock single core over the slower clock dual core as I hear they're better for video editing). I'm gonna go with a 7800GT video card as well to pick up that slack-- I can't afford much more than that. This thing's really adding up.
Click to expand...

If you're talking Magic Bullet, I'm not sure that anything will really make it real-time but Red Giant claims you can with a 7800GT. Sounds like you'll have a really nice system when you're all done.
-Dan
 
TeleDan said:
If you're talking Magic Bullet, I'm not sure that anything will really make it real-time but Red Giant claims you can with a 7800GT. Sounds like you'll have a really nice system when you're all done.
-Dan
Click to expand...
Yes, Magic Bullet. I did see, I think through Event DV e-mailing, that with an upgrade to the latest version and a 7800 card that, yes, you can achieve realtime. -I'm not holding my breath though- Typically these claims are for one filter only. You do anything else to the clip, and there goes realtime and back to watching paint dry.
 
Hi Joe,

I ended up purchasing a Broadcomm Raidcore Card - RC4852 (I think that's the correct number) for my SATA controller card. You can do a search on some comparison - I pretty much went blind reading all the data :). No complaints! I've got 5 WD250JD drives attached in a RAID 5 w/ a 250 gig OS drive. All apps on OS drive.

This ended up being the best option for me - I was looking at storage, cost and speed (last); and at the time the whole setup cost me under 1k - :(.
 
RAID 0 is NOT necessary for regular DV editing. RAID 1 is recommended only if you are super serious about backing things up.
My system consist of a 74Gb Raptor 10K rpm operating system drive, 2-250Gb Western Digital drives in RAID 1, and two seperate 250Gb drives also for storage.
I usually capture to the 500Gb drive and save my final projects to either of the 250Gb drives.
 
Just wanted to make something clear - when you drop 5 filters on a clip in your timeline and playback slows, it's not because your hard drives aren't fast enough, it's a processor thing (or, in certain specialized cases like MB, a video card thing).
 
overnighttolondon said:
Just wanted to make something clear - when you drop 5 filters on a clip in your timeline and playback slows, it's not because your hard drives aren't fast enough, it's a processor thing (or, in certain specialized cases like MB, a video card thing).
Click to expand...
Yes, I'm aware of that-- primarily the reason I'm spending some extra money and going with dual Opteron's. The biggest question I have had and that I can't seem to get an answer to is what is the marriage between the CPU(s) and the video card speed with regards to video editing? For example, Red Giants claim wasn't that you needed a particular speed CPU, it was a video card of 7800 or faster???

Joe
 
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