Mid to High End Turnkey Editing System – June 2007

[Harm Millaard]

Instead of going with 3 1TB WD disks in Raid5, I would opt for 6 500GB Samsung T166 disks in Raid5. They are a lot cheaper, they run cooler and quieter and give you a significant performance gain over a 3 disk array. For the controller I would look at a hardware based raid controller from Areca, the best there is.

[Andrew Swan]

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

3- I don't think you'll see that much of a performance improvement from going with a very fast system drive... video editing is mostly limited to drive bandwidth, not seek times. Maybe your programs will load a few seconds faster but... you'll likely save more time by just having a bigger 7200rpm hard drive to store all your stock library footage on (and not waste as much time clearing out drive space).

Noted. I'll probably switch to a cheaper Seagate drive, then.

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

4- You might be able to save some money on the DVD burner, depending on your needs.

I'm a Plextor fan, and my current burner (PX-504A) is single-layer only. I have friends who've used Sony burners and are happy with them, so I might just go that route. I'm just always concerned about compatibility of the media I burn, and the choice of burner seems to have a significant role in that, so that's why I was thinking Plextor.

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

5- In Windows XP SP2, you might see only 3GB of RAM.

Understood. I'm mainly doing this for a future Vista upgrade, although I've heard/read elsewhere that uneven RAM pairs (i.e. 2+1 chips) can have issues. The 4-chip configuration is a price thing for me, but is there really that much of a difference with 2 2GB chips?

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

6- Video card?

My bad. I'm getting a 512MB Geforce 8800GT of some variety (They sell out so quickly I don't know what brand will be available). I'm getting this mostly for it's improved video playback features, although After Effects 3D layer acceleration is a bonus too.

Originally Posted by Andre Tira

i dont trust the wester digital.

recently bought a 500gb LaCie and great so far.

I have heard many, many bad things about lower-end LaCie drives, but I do use a 500GB LaCie external that has served me well so far. I'm only going with the Caviar GP because it's been highly rated in tests, as well as being very power efficient (the Raptor is, again, very highly rated), but I agree with you that any other WD drive I would be very cautious about buying. Their external drives especially seem to have ridiculously high failure rates.

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

Lacie doesn't make the hard drive that's in the enclosure... it is likely WD or Seagate or Maxtor or Hitachi etc. etc.
As far as external enclosures go, lots of people report problems with external drives. Definitely make sure that the drive is being cooled well (or have a backup plan in case the drive dies).

Also a good point. It seems like from reviews I've read that you need to pay a fair amount extra for a consistently reliable external drive (G-tech, etc.), and based on the case design, cooling seems to be a big factor. I realize I'm taking a risk with the Fantoms, but again, price comes into play, as well as space/power for external drives is at a premium in my workspace.

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Instead of going with 3 1TB WD disks in Raid5, I would opt for 6 500GB Samsung T166 disks in Raid5. They are a lot cheaper, they run cooler and quieter and give you a significant performance gain over a 3 disk array. For the controller I would look at a hardware based raid controller from Areca, the best there is.

I thought about that. The reason I'm looking into fewer drives is threefold: power usage, system noise, and price. My case and power supply are geared at reducing noise and cooling efficiency. I'm sure a RAID controller would be much faster, but I don't know if I want to spend $500+ on a controller as well as an additional $200 for the same capacity. Also, I'm using a codec that is supposed to work on non-RAID systems, so I don't need 130MB/s sustained transfer rates as far as I know (about 13MB/s per video channel is what Online JPEG requires, according to the manual). Still, thanks for the recommendations, it looks like it would make a really sweet uncompressed HD system for a low cost, so I'll definitely look into it for the future.

Note: For a better look at why I'm looking at the Caviar GP as a drive, check out exhaustive reviews here and here. I haven't found any RAID-array reviews of the GP so far, but it looks like seek times are the only significant drawback to the drive.

Thanks for all the great input so far, I think I'm getting a better idea of what I'm facing here.

[Glenn Chan]

1- DVD burner:
It might be that you're best off using good media.

2- RAM:
You would get slightly more performance by having all your sticks of RAM being the same model instead of some mixed configuration.

I don't think there'd be any reason to go with 2X2GB chips. (Unless you plan on buying an additional 2 sticks of RAM after you upgrade to Vista.)

You might want to check the hardware recommendations on Premiere Pro and After Effects and look at your needs to figure out how much RAM you want.

With WinXP SP2 I think you'll either have 2GB (if you have 2X1gb) or 3GB (with 4X1GB of RAM).

3- On-board RAID controllers:
It looks like the on-board RAID controller for the Intel ICH7R has some issues... not fun. (But the people in that thread do get the problems fixed.)
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/...0006208731/p/1

4- External drives:
In my opinion, the Prolific chipset drives are pretty sketchy. The old firmwares will have delayed write failures... eventually this will corrupt the MBR and you'll need to use data recovery software. Flashing the drive will fix this, but the drive won't play well with other FW devices on the same bus.

A lot of the enclosures out there with USB2 and firewire have this problem. (Lacie uses the Oxford chipset, so it doesn't have this particular problem.)

Of Bytecc enclosures, their website can be misleading... anything with USB2+firewire has the prolific chipset; if the model is firewire-only, it might have the oxford chipset.

Something to watch out for. You might want to buy the same model drive as your RAID array (if you go that route) and buy a separate enclosure... this way, you have a drive you can use to replace any failed drives in the RAID. Of course you'd need to move data off.

[Andrew Swan]

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

1- DVD burner:
It might be that you're best off using good media.

Agreed. I use Taiyo Yuden TG0004 DVD+Rs at the moment. My main concern is faulty laser power calibration on cheaper drives, as well as the durability of the drive itself, as it will likely see a lot of use.

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

3- On-board RAID controllers:
It looks like the on-board RAID controller for the Intel ICH7R has some issues... not fun.

Very good to know. Can you (or anybody) recommend a cheaper motherboard of similar hardware support (onboard wi-fi not nessicary) without onboard RAID, then? I may just take Harm's advice (partially) and get a $300 4-port Areca controller.

edit: Poking around on Newegg, I found a very highly rated and cheaper motherboard (ABIT IP35 Pro), and have looked into an Areaca ARC-1210 controller card for around $329, which looks like the way to go.

Backing up is still an issue, and I think some sort of external RAID enclosure hooked up via eSATA (JBOD, not RAID, though) might be the way to go.

[Stephen Armour]

Glenn mentioned Intel on-board RAID issues and the main prob we seem to have, is the ganged ports with the controller.

We are going to go to a separate Areca controller exactly to address that problem. It gets especially critical when you're trying to do multilayers of HD stuff. You need the speed and onboard just can't cut it. Plus, 4 good Seagate SATA II's 500GB's are cheap and plenty fast enough in a RAID 0.

[Harm Millaard]

Originally Posted by Stephen Armour

Glenn mentioned Intel on-board RAID issues and the main prob we seem to have, is the ganged ports with the controller.

We are going to go to a separate Areca controller exactly to address that problem. It gets especially critical when you're trying to do multilayers of HD stuff. You need the speed and onboard just can't cut it. Plus, 4 good Seagate SATA II's 500GB's are cheap and plenty fast enough in a RAID 0.

Seagates have a good reputation. An alternative to suggest is the Samsung Spinpoint range, because they run cooler and with less noise and - at least over here - are significantly cheaper. Take into consideration that Dell switched to Samsung completely, so they can't be bad in comparison to Seagates and in tests come out slightly faster as well.

[Corey Sosner]

Allright, Now with the comming holidays Im waiting on the prices to drop I know after Jan 1 everything will be a free for all , Is there any updates on this system build?
Thanks Jon,
C

[Jon McGuffin]

Sorry to have not chimed in here for some time..

A few points..

#1) It was mentioned earlier that Intel is having difficulties with RAID support on their ICH7R chipsets. Any modern motherboard should be in the ICH9R series. Perhaps they mistyped?

#2) I'm sure the Western Digital GP drive will be fine but the energy savings and noise reduction is probably not going to be that noticeable over most other drives. I know the reviews (i've read them) rave about this drives small eco-footprint but if you really start to add this type of usage up over the span of the year, it's kinda crazy to think that this is going to make a difference of any kind. You could probably car pool just one time throughout the year and do 1000X more for the environment than the minute amount of electrical power difference between the 1Tb WD GP drive and any other comparable. I really believe this is simply just a marketing maneuver by WD to position themselves as an ECO friendly company to the masses and jump on this gravy train first. This is of course an opinion, I'm not against conserving energy by any stretch, but I think we're taking this maybe a bit too far.

#3) 4Gb for preparing for Vista one day is going to leave you disapoitned because Vista doesn't support more than the same amount of memory XP does. They are both 32-bit operating systems, and the limitation of accessing memory is built upon the same premise in both operating systems. XP 64-bit and Vista 64-bit, of course, do not have this limitation. I would love for Vista 64-bit support to start taking a stronger foothold in the computing industry. I'm currently stearing FAR clear from Vista, but I think Vista 64-bit if developed correctly, could be very promising.

Andrew's spec's are pretty much about what a good HDV system is all about today. I was thinking of starting a new thread with a December version of a good Mid to High End Turnkey Editing system but I think anybody who can read this forumn over time has been given enough information to make an informed decision. They've certainly found a good place to ask questions!

Jon

[Glenn Chan]

#1) It was mentioned earlier that Intel is having difficulties with RAID support on their ICH7R chipsets. Any modern motherboard should be in the ICH9R series. Perhaps they mistyped?

That would be me... I was interested in how the low-cost on-board RAID solutions fare (and I didn't research very thoroughly/hard/thoughtfully). ICH9R would be more relevant, yes. If that is rock solid then it might be worth going for... but if the RAID has issues, then you can be worse off than no RAID.
e.g. Any data corruption is essentially no RAID (and some of the other low-cost built-in RAID solutions might be doing that), and not being able to rebuild a RAID5 volume defeats the purpose of RAID5.

[Stephen Armour]

Originally Posted by Jon McGuffin

Sorry to have not chimed in here for some time..

A few points..

#1) It was mentioned earlier that Intel is having difficulties with RAID support on their ICH7R chipsets. Any modern motherboard should be in the ICH9R series. Perhaps they mistyped?

Jon

Jon, I would hardly consider workstation level boards like the Intel D975XBX2 not "a modern motherboard"! And it is definitely ICH7R, using the 975X Express Chipset. Where do you get your info?

Though not bleeding edge, boards based on that chipset are very stable, very fast, and still very much "modern". You can pay a premium for 45nm tech, but your cost/benefit may not be as much as you think...yet. Soon maybe, but not yet.

As to the Intel "RAID issues", some of ours were resolved when we discovered Seagate had throttled our Barracuda's (Gen 2) with a jumper...yank that off and some of our thruput probs blew away.

My two bits.

[Jon McGuffin]

Originally Posted by Stephen Armour

Jon, I would hardly consider workstation level boards like the Intel D975XBX2 not "a modern motherboard"! And it is definitely ICH7R, using the 975X Express Chipset. Where do you get your info?

Though not bleeding edge, boards based on that chipset are very stable, very fast, and still very much "modern". You can pay a premium for 45nm tech, but your cost/benefit may not be as much as you think...yet. Soon maybe, but not yet.

My two bits.

Well, I suppose we could argue back and forth whether a board that has been out in the marketplace for over two years now is really "modern". I'm not really concerned with how new something is, but I suppose if there are issues with the RAID controller on that motherboard, or any 975X motherboard that uses ICH7R, then that would contradict your point of them being stable and reliable.

I'm certainly not advocating to jump on something like X48 because it's "modern". I'm merely advocating that somebody purchase a board with a chipset that is maybe a little more current like the P35.

Jon

[Stephen Armour]

The cost/benefit target area is surely a moving target. If the funds are available, someone is always wise to shoot for the nex gen of chipsets these days.

But that Intel board I mentioned has been out only slightly over 1 yr, as I believe it was only announced last October...hardly "old tech". It is an entry level workstation/server board with a proven track record and certainly viable for a good time down the road.

I've been a "bleeding edger" for over 20 yrs, so I guess I'm getting a little more skeptical in my old age. Stability in video editing is pretty important and the referred to prob's with the Intel RAID's seem to be mostly taken care of. Intel has a good record for stability, and though we also have several other boards, the Intels have been like rocks...(not boat anchors... :) .

Having said all that, if we had the $$, we'd probably jump to the 5400 (or even 7000 series, ha!)...and really fly high! For an editor/film hyphenate, there is never enough power to satisfy, and things can never happen as fast as the thoughts/ideas appear in our brains.

Now if we could just hook them up directly to a screen...

[Jim Browning]

Okay, so I have my new box up and running, with a 150GB Raptor 10,000 RPM system disk, and a Hitachi 1TB for data... before I format that hog, the question is:

What is the optimum cluster size for this kind of work? Maximum size?

[Jon McGuffin]

Originally Posted by Jim Browning

Okay, so I have my new box up and running, with a 150GB Raptor 10,000 RPM system disk, and a Hitachi 1TB for data... before I format that hog, the question is:

What is the optimum cluster size for this kind of work? Maximum size?

I'd go with the default cluster size for that NTFS partition.

[Harm Millaard]

I second that. If you start using a raid, it may be worthwhile for video editing to use a stripe size of 128K, but otherwise use the defaults.