computer for V1 processing
 

I decided to upgrade the computer to handle the V1....

I'm now wondering if some of you could chime in here and tell me how important or not that I RAID 0 the drives.....

is it necessary for the V1 footage or whats the story...

The system is the Dell 390 with Quad core 266...

I did get double 160GB 10K drives... so the Raid 0 is matched if necessary....

so what are your thoughts, Raid or no Raid... and the benefits...

I'm asking before I load too much stuff as the Raid setup will wipe out everything and I don't want to have to reload the goodies ...

This is a question that might be best asked in the software section of the forums. Do you know which editing package you will be using?

RAID is very nice to have but not necessary. I have it on my computer with a pair of 320gig drives. I'm using Avid Liquid and the render partition is on the RAID.

I think what is MUCH more important is to have the OS and applications on a different drive from your video and/or render drive. In my setup I have an OS drive, a primary video drive for capture and then the RAID setup for all the rendered video. I have an external 320gig I use to backup the active projects. This drive I also use for field capture with the laptop.

The drives used to edit video will take a beating and are more likely to failure. Having a separate OS drive will save you LOTS of headache when the time comes to put new drives in. If you are doing this for a living, I recommend replacing video drives yearly. You don't want to run these drives to failure. They will always fail in the middle of an important project at the worst time you know. ;)



Chris

Depending on what and how you'll be editing will result in a variation of requirements, but you should generally follow something along the lines of....

....One O/S drive
....One Audio drive, extra files, etc.
....Video drive(s), raid, etc.

I have multiple systems but my newest is the following:

System drive - 320G SATA 7200rpm
File drive (music, graphics, etc.) - single 500G SATA 7200rpm
Video drive - 4x500G SATA 7200rpm (internal)
Video drive - as above, doubled 2x2 (external)

Raid / Striped setups have benefits in terms of speed as the files run parallel at the same segments of the disc but the biggest compromise is if one drive goes down. This is because if any raided drive fails the information is lost across all of the drives.

Multple drives are safer in the respect to the above, but it really depends on your application. If Seagate's new drives hold 750G, but you want a drive that's more, you can stripe 4, for instance, and have a 3T drive.

My average HDV project is about 400-500G so striping in my case certainly has its benefits.

Not necessarily. It depends which flavour of RAID you choose. One of the biggest benefits of a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Discs is that you can build in fault-tolerance by having some data redundancy. Say you have 5 discs in your array, you arrange them so that data is written in stripes across 4 of them and check-words (or something of the sort) are written to the fifth one. Thus, if one disc fails, you can recover the data from the other four. It's many years since I studied this (it really is mature technology now), but I believe this is referred to as "RAID 3". Before I read Marshall's post, I took it for granted that anyone using RAID would choose a redundant / fault tolerant version.

Here's a pretty good explanation I found -

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

Keep in mind that most raid controllers found in non-server CPU boxes tend to only offer types 0, 1, and sometimes 0+1 so you'd need to find the specific info on your proposed hardware to know what your options are... Steve

Let me ask something. My RAID system setup is in progress (4x500Gb). I also have 2 internal drives, one for OS and one more. I have an external drive as well.

How to setup the system for speed (multiple streams when editing), optimal storage, etc.

Shall I use RAID for storing the captured clips OR for the rendered video?
If for the rendered, as suggested in one of the posts earlier, I dont see how can I make use of the faster speed of RAID when editing.

My idea was to store the captured files in the RAID (making use of the speed when editing) and print the rendered files to the non-OS internal drive, while using the external for audio and graphics.

Any comments, please?

I use mine for rendering and some video storage. My active project though goes on a stand alone 320gig SATA drive installed in the machine.

I found with AVID Liquid I get the best performance that way. My main video storage drive (a single 320gig SATA) can easily read multiple HDV streams without choking. The issue becomes reading the rendered transitions and such. The more effects and rendered items you use in a project the more pronounced this will become. I've also found that using the RAID for the render drive has a measurable impact on processor utilization when compressing the final output to DVD or the WEB or whatever. I could never get the processor over about 80% before setting up the RAID. Now It runs 95% and above. Nothing else in the machine changed other than installing the RAID card and the drives.

Since my RAID is also pretty large I put objects that I reuse over and over and use it for short term storage of projects that aren't being worked on actively.

This is only my way and isn't to imply it is THE way or better than anyone elses approach. Based on my computer/software configuration it is the most efficent setup (based on actual measurements).

One last thing I plan to do is install one more drive to serve as the swapfile drive. That will happen later this year when I build the Core2 based machine.

Chris