I have to apologize for this--I asked this several months ago, got an answer, and now I don't remember it and can't find the original thread, so I need to ask it again. For keeps!:

I have a computer with two hard drives; I use Vegas. How do I switch to the other drive for creating new files/projects? Is it an XP thing or Vegas? I want to utilize the other drive but can't seem to access it for creating and saving new editing projects.

Thanks!
(feeling humble)

When you go to file - Save As or File - Render, it should just be a matter of browsing to the other drive.

If you mean capturing, open the capture app and in the preferences you can add and remove different drives.

Assuming your drives are labeled C & D, keep your OS and programs on drive C and all Vegas-related media on drive D.
It's not a good idea to do any editing (including rendering) from drive C as this will slow the process down considerably.
BTW, the same rule applies to the various folders (temp, render, etc.) that you can assign in Vegas and DVD Architect.

Thank you both greatly!

I have this current setup:

C: System & Program drive
D: DVD Burner (Soon to replace the DVD Burners with Blu-ray Burners)
E: DVD Burner
F: Capture Drive (1TB) (also contains music library)
G: Render Drive (200GB)
H: Author Drive (250GB)
I: "Scratch" Drive (250GB) I use this for all program's temporary access folders.. ie: Adobe Scratch Drive, Vegas Temp working folder (set in preferences) and etc.

The workflow is great and am always going from one drive to another NEVER working the next step to the same drive. All drives are SATA II. Also have indexing turned off on all drives and only C: drive is configured for Virus Scanner (but completely disabled for editing/rendering times.)

Jerome, have you always had a scratch drive? I've got an area on my render drive that is always for scratch, but curious to know if you have noticed any additional speed value by having a scratch drive set aside.

Question???????

I use separate Sata drives but was wondering if I wanted to use a 1Terra USB drive, where should I use it. Would it be best to use it for the destination when I render?

Todd, I personally wouldn't render to USB drives, because burning DVDs later from information on that drive wouldn't be nearly certain to give you a perfect DVD. I would render to an internal drive or and e-sata drive to reduce the chances for errors in the burning process.

USB drives are best for storage. Using it as you suggested would work, but wouldn't be ideal.

Todd, I personally wouldn't render to USB drives, because burning DVDs later from information on that drive wouldn't be nearly certain to give you a perfect DVD.

I do this all the time and have yet to have any glitches with DVD's. What sort of issues might give me non-perfect DVD's from USB external drives?

Last wedding I did, I put everything (ended up 300gb) on a USB external drive. (Actually its both Firewire and USB, but I was using USB). I didn't notice any problems in editing, rendering, or burning.

Jeff...... Are you saying there would be no problems using a USB hard drive for rendering?
I guess if I had problems burning from it, I could always copy it back to a SATA drive for burning?

Todd, USB will likely work fine for you most all of the time, I wouldn't worry about it, go ahead and use your USB if you want. Read below to see why I said what I said.

Andy, did I say USB wouldn't work? No I did not. If you are going to choose a drive for burning and if you had choices and I repeat IF you have choices, I wouldn't RECOMMEND it. I find USB and Firewire inefficient and slow. Everyone cannot afford e-sata and fast 1Tb internal drives, however, and I am aware of that.

I have encountered, over the years, enough issues with Firewire and USB drives that I do not recommend them except for storage.

The man asked for opinions and I simply gave mine.

I can say that one wedding project that was located on a USB drive did not burn properly last year. I do not know conclusively it was the USB issue, but when I moved the project to an internal drive there were no more glitches. It could have been anything that cause the bad burn, I know. On the other hand, I can't take chances. I am too busy.

I have at any given time have 4-10 weddings in process and I cannot afford mistakes, as I do not have time to watch every DVD I burn. I had a project a few weeks ago where I had to copy 50 DVDs. I am not going to risk my time and money unecessarily on a relatively flaky format like USB.

I have owned many USB anf Firewire drives. I found them troublesome and slow. If you do not do much volume there is no need to have the large enterprise-class internal drives or e-sata drives, I suppose.

I currently have USB drives and they are for archiving old projects. Hence I recommended what I do.

I was transfering files from one USB drive to another (about 50GB worth of Data) while my employee was waiting the other day and something froze up, stopped the transfer cold. Again, USB is fine for storage, but for moving files around I don't care for it. I never have those kind of issue with e-sata, but that is just my experience.

Before I became as busy as I am now these issues were not a big deal, and I was perfectly happy with USB, most of the time. USB is a fine, economical solution for those that want it. If you're using it and you're happy, that's great!

I need to add that a friend of mine who produces literally hundreds of videos per year from his Mac studio uses mainly USB drives, he's got dozens of them. Even he, though is tired of them and with each new system he is going with mujltiple TB internals.

Jeff,

no problems mate and thanks for the detailed clarification of your thoughts - we all learn from each other on here and that's was the intention of my question - no critisism implied or intended. Thanks for taking the time in your busy schedule to reply.

Jerome, have you always had a scratch drive? I've got an area on my render drive that is always for scratch, but curious to know if you have noticed any additional speed value by having a scratch drive set aside.
Hey DSE! I have just recently started doing this. Somehow during my recent upgrade, I ended up with another drive and thought to do this. Photoshop seems to run smoother since doing it. Vegas runs much faster... wait, its probably my new processor and memory that is making all that run faster. :)


Seriously, I don't know how much better it works, but it should do nothing but improve operations. Its like having your windows paging file on a seperate drive.

Hope you are doing well!

Jerome, I have a somewhat dumb question. You list four hard drives...are they divided between internal and external? Do you have a customized built computer for this purpose?

Jerome, I have a somewhat dumb question. You list four hard drives...are they divided between internal and external? Do you have a customized built computer for this purpose?
All internal. I built my PC... I've built all of them. I have 6 SATA ports on motherboard so those next 2 will be filled with the Blu-ray drives. The 2 IDE ports will probably be empty, UNLESS I decide to keep the 2 DVD Burners.

Andy, didn't mean to be testy. Been on this machine for close to 48 hours. I am hungry and tired. I need these discussions when I take a break! I have been to hell and back with hard drive configurations. And I really wanted to convey my point without knocking USB or offending those that use them sucessfully. But of all my HD configurations, USB drives have been the weakest link when I use them. Actually that is not true...networked storage gave me the biggest headaches, followed by USB and then Firewire. E-Sata ended many of my storage issues from a hardware standpoint. They seemingly react exactly as if they are internal, they are just as fast. Speed aside, there just seems to be something about the USB bus that makes it unreliable for me for handling large amounts of data.

BTW, if anyone is interested I have ordered the Velociraptor which should arrive tomorrow. I intend to replace two old raptors in a Raid 0 configuration with one of the new to reduce the heat in my case and allow me to add another 1Tb drive.. Can the new one alone beat two old ones in Raid 0? I doubt it, but I have heard it will. Has anyone tried it?

BTW, if anyone is interested I have ordered the Velociraptor which should arrive tomorrow. I intend to replace two old raptors in a Raid 0 configuration with one of the new to reduce the heat in my case and allow me to add another 1Tb drive.. Can the new one alone beat two old ones in Raid 0? I doubt it, but I have heard it will. Has anyone tried it?

That drive looks pretty sweet! I might have to look at those in the future.

Well Jerome, the verdict is mixed on them, but I'm trying one out. Some say they are only moderately better than the old Raptors, others say they are great. I really like the lower power requirements, low heat.

I had initially hoped to go with the Savio 15K Cheetah drive, reputed to be the fastest drive around, (2.6 Seek time) but I can't afford the SAS controller card, they are $600 dollars or something like that. There are cheaper controller cards, but I hear they are not worth buying.

I'll tell you, if you are in the market for a fast drive, the Spinpoint F1 1Tb drive is pretty darn nice. Very fast, and in some benchmarks they even beat the Raptors. They the Samsung Spinpoint is only $179 at newegg. Some people report problems with them, but I have them and they are great. The disc utility from Samsung for them really sucks.. but you cannot beat the price for 1Tb.

Well Jerome, the verdict is mixed on them, but I'm trying one out. Some say they are only moderately better than the old Raptors, others say they are great. I really like the lower power requirements, low heat.

I had initially hoped to go with the Savio 15K Cheetah drive, reputed to be the fastest drive around, (2.6 Seek time) but I can't afford the SAS controller card, they are $600 dollars or something like that. There are cheaper controller cards, but I hear they are not worth buying.

I'll tell you, if you are in the market for a fast drive, the Spinpoint F1 1Tb drive is pretty darn nice. Very fast, and in some benchmarks they even beat the Raptors. They the Samsung Spinpoint is only $179 at newegg. Some people report problems with them, but I have them and they are great. The disc utility from Samsung for them really sucks.. but you cannot beat the price for 1Tb.
Let me know how that works for you. I made an error in my post above... all drives are SATA II except system drive. It is the 160 WD Raptor but only SATA I.

I'll definitely post my findings!

Todd, I personally wouldn't render to USB drives, because burning DVDs later from information on that drive wouldn't be nearly certain to give you a perfect DVD. I would render to an internal drive or and e-sata drive to reduce the chances for errors in the burning process.

USB drives are best for storage. Using it as you suggested would work, but wouldn't be ideal.

A USB drive stores data exactly as any other. Most external drives (USB and FireWire) use everyday EIDE drives.

USB drives work just as well as other ones. Indeed, the only grief I have had with external drives was with a USB/FireWire combo that had very erratic connectivity using the FireWire option.

With modern PCs, the CPU-based control of data transfer with a USB drive (since there is no master controller such as there is with FireWire) is of little importance. My own tests of USB vs. FireWire show no difference in performance when rendering a project in Vegas using the external drives for source and rendered files.

The other advantage of using the USB option is that you can leave the FireWire interfaces free for DV/HDV devices.

Putting a FireWire hard drive on the same interface as a camcorder can definitely hurt performance since the speed of the bus will be that of the slowest device. Many camcorders have 100Mbps interfaces.

all drives are SATA II except system drive. It is the 160 WD Raptor but only SATA I.

I think this is a great way to go. Are you also stripping (RAID0) your video drives for even faster performance?

As for USB drives having problems, there are a couple things that have alleviated *most* of my USB headaches:

- Use only hard drives with 16MB buffer or better
- Plug directly into your USB 2.0 Port; do not use a USB hub between your video hard drive—even a USB 2.0 hub.

Having said that, USB is definitely not the way to go, if you can do eSATA or internal SATAII drives. Every bit of speed helps!

I give...

USB works! No doubt. I just don't like it, I guess.

Do you really need faster harddrives then SATA2 ??

SATA2 handles 300mbit/sec which is almost 40 mb/sec. Even when you guys capture video to uncomressed format, None of the existing dektop CPU's can process that amount of data so quick...

If you had a renderfarm with, let say 12x quad cores (48 threads/cores), then you can start thinking about the speed of your harddrives to be equal to the rest of the system.

...What's the use of having faster harddrives to your system, when your not able to use that speed efficient...

Kim, I think you are right, of course....for most rendering etc., there is no difference in speed with faster hard drive, except I've heard one person say that when rendering certain things I forget what (maybe uncompressed AVI) it can be faster.

The faster hard drive setups are sweet because of system response times.

For example, have you noticed when you drag raw footage onto your Vegas timeline how long it can take for the peaks to build? I don't know about you but I usually drag about 8 to 10 hours of footage onto my timeline at one time when I begin my project, just to get everthing going.

When that raw footage resides on a raid 0 drive, the peaks build up within a couple of minutes at most.

With a single USB or other slower type of setup, that simple task takes much, much, much longer.

The benefit of faster drives is also that editing on the Vegas timeline is more responsive. Everything moves faster. Like when you move down the timeline quickly and it takes time for things to "catch-up", that's because of slow drives.

This is why video editors use Raid setups.

People that edit for a hobby or have long time in-between jobs and who have lots of time to finish projects don't care as much. But if you do lots of videos in a short amount of time, are under deadlines and are using multi-cams, then you really do need the speed. If you don't need it, save your money and spend it on something fun.

Yes Jeff, If your Harddrives is fast, it takes a lot quicker to manage your media files in your harddrives. But, something more very much important, is to defrag your haddrives often....

Let say you install an application, copy files between drives and so on, and when you then delete or remove stuffs, you make space on intervals...

When you then again move, copy or install files it uses those interval spaces AND in the end of the harddrive AND there it can find empty space.
So Your file is proberly placed in disorder (fragmented)...

This means that every time you use this file, the harddrive head have to go back & forward to manage those files.
Defrag is, I will say, neccesary for faster workflow...

Still it is your RAM and CPU which will process the data in your projects the most, the harddrives is only good in the purpose that they can "following along" with the rest of the sytem...

/Kim

One would assume that anyone following this thread already knows to defragment their hard drive, Kim, wouldn't you say?

yeah? Did I hurt anyone?

Of course not. That was excellent information you provided, thank you very much.

For those interested it took all of 20 minutes to install clone my old raid Raptors drives and install the new Velociraptor. Interestingly even though previously ran 3 raptors in raid 0 for my OS, I'm finding the new single drive actually does seem to load programs faster. No difference with Vegas that I notice, but other apps load almost instantly, whereas before they did hesitate, especially Adobe products. The drive is so quiet I cannot hear it even with my ear next to the case. It is a nice drive, and I can tentatively recommend it. It is actually eerie. I was used to having three of those other drives banging around, this will take some getting used to!

And thanks again Kim for the reminder on defragmenting, very good stuff.

The old Defrag......... I agree most people on here would know to do it regularly however it is amazing how many people never do it and then wonder why they have pc problems let alone slower performance.

This is one of the reasons for my post earlier about using a usb drive. My pc has no drive bays left.
I only have 1 pc and it's used as both work (video) and home pc. Far from ideal I know.
Like most home pc's I have stacks of movies,music,photos and the like then it gets fairly hard to keep it all sorted.
My wife is on the pc when ever I'm not working or it's not doing a long render, so finding the time to defrag gets a bit tricky.

You are probably right about that Todd. I defrag my OS at least every other day, sometimes I do it twice in one day, so I just couldn't imagine anyone that didn't. Heck after I am done with a project I reformat my work drive (video drive) everytime. It is habit with me.

You know Todd it is funny you should mention the USB thing again. Today I needed a hard drive to transfer some data to share it with someone. I got out an old USB drive enclosure (Adaptec) that has an old IDE drive inside of it. I hadn't used that drive for probably a year or more. I had forgotten what a great drive that was. Worked without a hitch. Obviously it is slow for data transfer, but otherwise it is very solid.

On the other hand, I have several larger much newer USB/Firewire combos that have always been flaky, I can't stand them.

I suppose I have had generally bad luck with externals, hence my bad attitude about them. I think I will shop around for new Adaptec enclosures and take those originals out of their factory case and see what happens!

I'm sure yourself Jeff, probably like a lot of us on this site, have helped many frinds or family who have no idea about computers let alone defragging. God knows what my parents, in-laws,friends would do with out me.
Just this week my parents pc crashed and burned. I said "don't worry ,you have been backing everything up like I showed you haven't you?" No was the answer of course.

I don't usually have to worry about defragging that often because most of my projects are small for the web but I do try and do it once a month. I am about to do it this week because I have a wedding to edit.

I know usb is not the ideal way to go but until I upgrade to a dedicated pc, usb will have to do. I don't even use raid. I just backup to 2 or 3 usb drives.

I must say Jeff. After your earlier post about burning from external usb drives, I have changed my set up to burn from an internal sata.

If your USB drives are better than mine, I'm sure they are fine. I don't know what it is about the Fantom or LaCie drives, haven't worked out for me.

But see, you mentioned small projects, and that is the answer. If your projects are small, the USB drives will be fine anyway. My problems with them were usually when transferring 100Gb size files and such.

Good luck with your family sounds like you need it!

LOL
With all the times I didn't listen to them when I was younger it's only fair.

You are probably right about that Todd. I defrag my OS at least every other day, sometimes I do it twice in one day, so I just couldn't imagine anyone that didn't. Heck after I am done with a project I reformat my work drive (video drive) everytime. It is habit with me.

With Vista (my default these days), I use the scheduled defragmentation tool that runs every week. It is enabled by default. Indeed, since I installed Vista 18 months ago I haven't even looked to see the level of fragmentation. Manual defragmentation has become as unnecessary as double declutching - useful to know how to do in an emergency but that's about it...

You shouldn't use scheduled defragmentation tool... How nice is it, if it activates during a rendering or a heavy workflow time...

Even if Vista use minimal resourses when your system i occupied, its sometime to much...

Me myself, defrags only when I go to bed or being away a couple of hours. Then i know it can't interfere me.

Try find a third defragmentation tool which can defragment immovable system files like page files, the event logs, the Registry hives and the hibernation files, all of which normally cannot be defragmented.

If you jumping around with alot of different applications this is vital, that if you want your softwares to run smoothly...

Its not either healthy that the defragmetation tool is being used while your working. Because if the tool, defragment your files that you are currently working with/on, there can be damage on your sectors. And how do you think your Harddrive Head will feel, when being overloaded. This can make its lifetime much shorter because of the rotation with no pauses and heatpoblems...

I agree about the interference.

My scheduled defrag is set for 1:00am every Wednesday morning. If I happen to be renderering overnight on a Tuesday/Wednesday, I can suspend the defragmentation.

On my current system, I haven't needed a third-party tool since my system partitions are sufficiently large enough. On older systems, I have needed to and use the free PageDefrag tool from MS that runs at boot time and, hence, can deal with paging files, registry hives etc:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx

In my experience, certain antivirus packages are far more intrusive, non-configurable and resource hungry. e.g., NIS. I couldn't suspend it at all and it would frequently interfere (at least once an hour, consuming most of the CPU time). Even with a valid subscription remaining, I finally ditched it for a freeware package that permits full control.

I have this current setup:

C: System & Program drive
D: DVD Burner (Soon to replace the DVD Burners with Blu-ray Burners)
E: DVD Burner
F: Capture Drive (1TB) (also contains music library)
G: Render Drive (200GB)
H: Author Drive (250GB)
I: "Scratch" Drive (250GB) I use this for all program's temporary access folders.. ie: Adobe Scratch Drive, Vegas Temp working folder (set in preferences) and etc.

The workflow is great and am always going from one drive to another NEVER working the next step to the same drive. All drives are SATA II. Also have indexing turned off on all drives and only C: drive is configured for Virus Scanner (but completely disabled for editing/rendering times.)

Hi I have a question for the Vegas gurus out there;

I have a dual-boot but old laptop Clevo M590k aka Alienware MaLX with two sataII internals and 2 external USB drives. I asked this before, but noone has replied to my post..how does Vegas distribute the Mt2 files? I try to keep them separated (i.e. import from external USB 2, process on vista 64, render to other internal sata2 drive) but's it's not clear if the mt2 clips are imported into the operating system drive (i.e. where vegas is also running) or whether they're imported on the fly. Point being I would also like to keep all of above separate to cut down on seek\write\read times, as my render times with a measly turion single-core are around 4-10x original clip size with just a few titles.

Any advice would be appreciated. I don't know how to post a sig yet, so specs below...yes I know I need a new laptop or better yet a dual CPU server (preferably a dual quad-core opteron Barcelona) in small format...but that will be another thread...

Kind regards, Arne

M590k aka MaLX or Sager 5960
Turion ML-44 2.4 ghz single core. Dual 7900 Geforce Go GTX 512 Mb SLI
2 Gb RAM
2 x HDD 7200 rpm SATA II , 100 & 120 GB
1 x external USB 250 GB
1 x external USB 500 GB
19 inch screen 1680 x 1050 with 290 nits
3dmark06 circa 6180
PC mark etc...

how does Vegas distribute the Mt2 files?...................but's it's not clear if the mt2 clips are imported into the operating system drive (i.e. where vegas is also running) or whether they're imported on the fly.

Vegas imports/captures to the drive and directory you select in the preferences. If you set to capture to drive H, then that is where those files will be worked on from....