hi all,

My fren told me that connecting the hard disk to the mother board in a certain way can increase its performance when doing DV editing. Please see if i understood it correctly.

1) Make sure I have 2 hard disk, 1 for normal usage, the other one is solely for DV editing.
2) Set aside an IDE for the hard disk that I will save my footages in.
3) Make sure I dun connect any other Hard Disk/CDRW/CD-ROM to that hard disk via series or parallel (I dun really know what this means)
4) Set the hard disk doing the editing and storing of footages to MASTER. (Does this matter?)

Will this increase its performance?

Also, more questions

1) I have 1 mother board with 4 x IDES. 2 normal ones and 2 that can be used as RAID IDES. My manual says i can use the latter as normal IDES for CD-RW, CD-ROM so i can allocate 1 IDE to each of my 2 hard disk, is this right?

2) You dun need to raid hard disks to choose 15 mins from 4 hours footage do you?

Sorry if questions sounds amateurish but i am not the technical man in computers hard ware, only technical in lighting.

thanks in advance!

Hi there friend.... I see that you have raid on your system.. This is what I would do. 1. Set up your master drive on ide0 along with another drive as its slave. make sure that they are both 7500 rpm drives. Set up a 2 drive striped raid on the raid system, making sure that they are both on seperate cables and both as masters. Once the raid is setup and functioning, you could add another drive to the raid connection as a slave and set it up as ATA, or if the raid driver wont allow it, a single drive raid array. This drive would not be a raid, its only a way of fooling the raid controller.
3. set up your CD roms as master and slave onto the second ide channel. or you could do what I have done, and that is to insert a second raid card into the system and use it as an ATA card for Cd rom, Dvd, Burners ect.

Install all of your software onto drive c (ide0) and set your virtual ram to use this drive. I have a 20gig drive here. Bigger can run slower in real terms. use your stipped raid to process your editing and as the scratch disk, and once edited, put the finished video onto the second ide Drive.

The reason for this is that if one of the raid drives failed, you would loose the contents of the whole raid. so it makes sence to store them elswhere.

using this method, on a speed test, I have found that my raid throughput is 60% faster than my other drives.

Finally, if you know how, make a mirror image of your master boot disk, (norton ghost) and store it else where on your system.
About every month when windows becomes slower, as it usually does, you can simply ghost your partition back to its original place... Hope that this helps.

all the best Roy.

Personally I would let someone re-construct your system who
knows what they are doing [in regard to using it as a video
editing system]. There are a lot more things to consider then
where to put a drive, how many to get and whether you need
raid.

There are a lot of other things like: memory, file systems, operating
system etc. etc.

Hey Roy,
I plan on using vegas. Any idea what stripe size would be best in raid 0? What are you currently using, in terms of software and stripe size? Thanks.

Hi John,
As I use mainly prem with the OLD matrox 2000, and have only really used vegas to see how it works and to see if its as good as all of the experts say then I am no expert in vegas.
Just a point that I have found some features on each to be better and in particular I find the chromkeying on vegas to be better than prem...

anyway back to your question...
Always being one to swallow if I get it wrong, I have now found that having updated my system to a AMD 2600+ and new ATA 7200 hard drives that the troughput on my drives is now faster than it was on the raid, so I have actually stoped using the raid and gone to standard IDE. 120gb drives. Just shows you how systems are always set out to confound you. Anyway when I did use the raid, the size was dependant on the amout of data that I would be feeding it. As I only really make music videos 2x20gb making 1x40 raid was enough. I guess that you will have to get the old calc out and do some sums. sorry that I couldnt help much more.