how to set up hard drives for maximum performance?

M

mnewxcv

Member
Hi there. i am trying to configure my system for maximum performance, and am unsure how to setup my storage drives. Here is what I have for specs:

Xeon E5 1650 6 core
24gb ddr3 ECC RAM
gtx 770

for storage, I have the following at my disposal: 512GB SSD, 2x 300GB SAS 15k HDD, 2TB SATA 7.2K HDD.

It makes sense to me to use the SSD for my boot drive and for my applications. However, I am unsure whether to also use it as my scratch disk or if the 2 15k SAS drives in raid 0 would be beneficial. Additionally, would having my media from cam on the 2TB drive and exporting to the SAS drives in raid 0 be a bottleneck? Should I export SAS drives to SSD, or vice versa? Not really sure what to do here. Speed is my priority. Capacity is not an issue; I can always move my exports after they are done encoding.
 
It may depend to some extent on what the software likes best. An adobe tech told me (this for AE on a mac), apps on your boot drive. Scratch disc on the fastest drive you have. Footage and content on a very fast drive (he verified that speed is most needed for scratch with AE). So I did SSD internal boot, 2nd SSD internal scratch, 7200RPM RAID 0 internal for content. Worked really well. Premiere may want something else, and so on. But since various NLE components - editor, after effects, grading, etc - are rarely all running full-tilt at the same time, you could have a similar setup with scratch drives and footage spread out as optimal for the given software. I'd check with each manufacturer.

I doubt the write speed of your final export drive is a huge issue - usually rendering is slower than, say, copying between 2 drives. I doubt a drive that you could copy a file to with reasonable speed would be a bottleneck for final output. Even a spinning drive on USB3 seems OK to me.
 
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