New system suggestions for Vegas
 

Have around $1500 for a PC based system for Vegas - which I love - any advice ? Ill be buying the pieces at Newegg.com or other similar place. Im using a Canon 7D via Cineform, as well as other video cameras. PS Should 10,000rpm drives be used for system and storage? Thanks in advance...

If you can afford them, yes. Every little bit helps and speedy drives will make a difference.

Seems to me video guys had a nice DIY list for setting up your own I7 quad machine.

Also check the I7 thread in the Vegas forum.

After having bought the Dell XPS I think you are on the right track building your own!!!


Dale

..you mean here ?

Videoguys Blog - Videoguys' DIY7.7: Intel Core i7 with Vista 64 AND Now Windows 7

Looks nice!

Vince, you may like to consider the new SATA III (6 g),drives which are twice the speed of Sata II (3 g). There is one by Western Digital which is 1Tb. and not overly expensive considering the technology.

RonC.

I have the XPS too, works great but pray you never need support :(

I'll never buy another Dell...

If you are going to be using any drive in a RAID array, be advised that the consumer versions of the Western Digital SATA hard drives are unsuitable for this. This is because they automatically spin their platters down to a full stop as much as possible whether you want it or not (this automatic spin-down feature cannot be disabled at all due to the firmware used in the drives). And once the platters are stopped, it takes much too long for them to spin back up, resulting in the RAID array to detect the WD drives as "failed" even though they are all still usable! This will result in a permanent loss of data which cannot be recovered except with super-expensive professional data recovery. The only Western Digital SATA hard drives that are suitable for use in a RAID array are the RE-series (enterprise-level) drives, which are substantially more expensive per TB than the company's consumer-level drives. The RE drives do not have the firmware-level power-management features that all of WD's consumer-level drives have.

What's more, with current SATA III hard drives you'd be paying a premium for future needs. This is because at present all SATA III support comes from third-party chipsets which can steal bandwidth from the PCI-e 2.0 lanes (either from the X58 chipset's IOH or the Socket 1156 processor's integrated PCI-e 2.0 bus, or whatever dedicated PCI-e 2.0 connection used by AMD processors and chipsets) - as much as four PCI-e lanes worth. (On an 1156 platform, if the SATA III and USB 3.0 controllers are used to their full bandwidth, the combined PCI-e 2.0 bandwidth available for graphics card use would drop from x16 to x8 - and on a 1366 platform, one would not be able to run more than one graphics card at the full x16 bandwidth because the current USB 3.0 controllers are also run directly off of the PCI-e 2.0 lanes.) None of the current Intel or AMD chipsets natively support SATA III (or USB 3.0, for that matter); in this case, the drives would simply fall back to the SATA II mode when connected to the SATA ports controlled by the chipset's native SATA controller.

Randall,

If you were going to build your own raid 0 array and use esata, then what drives would you recomend.

I am rreally glad you mentioned this as I was going to buy WD drives. I have had to many failures in Seagate drives.

When I read the sata III suggestion I was going to mention compatibility issues but you gave first rate information on that, thanks, and good job!!!


As for service with my dell xps, they have been excellent for me. I had an issue and they sent a guy from 90 miles away to come out and fix it. The times I have used the phone line support I have been fortunate to get good help and resolved the problem with one of their resident experts, not the ordinary phone person!!

Dell has been good to me, I just think I would be better off making one from scratch with higher level components and more bay room for hard drives and coolers.



dale

You can run other brands of consumer SATA hard drives in a RAID 0 array. However, the consumer external hard drive kits are also unsuitable for this purpose due to their power management features that are very similar to the consumer WD internal SATA hard drives (they spin themselves completely down after a set period). This means that the only feasible choice for eSATA RAID would be a pair of internal SATA hard drives mounted inside a pair of aftermarket eSATA enclosures.

As for the internal SATA hard drives themselves, keep in mind that the consumer models (this includes Seagate, Hitachi and Samsung, not just WD) are not really all that suitable for RAID because of their relatively cheap innards that are not really rated for operation of more than about 8 hours per day. That said, many people have had no problems running such cheap drives 24 hours per day. This means that you might have to spend a lot more money (as much as $150 to $200 per TB as opposed to $80 to $100 per TB for the consumer 1TB drives) for an enterprise-level internal SATA hard drive just for additional peace of mind.

And yes, the SATA III and USB 3.0 controllers had to use the PCI-e 2.0 lanes simply because there are not enough non-graphics PCI-e 1.x lanes available to accomodate the two controllers. (For example, on the two i7 platforms, the P55 chipset used with socket 1156 provides only eight PCI-e 1.x lanes while the ICH10R that's used with the X58 chipset for Socket 1366 provides only six PCI-e 1.x lanes; had both of those SATA III and USB 3.0 controllers been connected directly to the P55 chipset, there would have been no room whatsoever for any PCI-e slots or additional PCI-e devices without being forced to steal PCI-e 2.0 lanes which would have been normally used for graphics. And the ICH10R simply does not have enough PCI-e 1.x lanes to accomodate both SATA III and USB 3.0 simultaneously.)

SATA III and USB 3.0, Oh, My!
 

May want to not worry about including all the bleeding edge stuff in your decisions right now. This stuff may take up to a 12-18 mos to get sorted out (read: debugged), and you may not want to suffer through this process.

If drive speed it really important, then consider buying Velociraptor hard drives configured as separate data drive. Raid0 if you are really brave, but Raid5 would be a more sane choice. Boot your OS & apps on separate disk, of course.

1366 looks to have a better longevity, the 1156 appears to be due to consumer and manufacturer blowback from triple channel ram requirement and the overall more expensive PC build cost that ate into Dell's and other's margins.

NOT to say the 1156 is bad, not by any means... either probably would be fine, so long as you stuck to the Core-I7 series CPU. But the 1366 with the memory-CPU available bandwidth (no Northbridge) seems a compelling choice if you are going to use a 64bit OS.

Randall. -

Quote - (How do you format this ?), " ... the consumer versions of the Western Digital SATA hard drives are unsuitable for this. This is because they automatically spin their platters down to a full stop as much as possible whether you want it or not (this automatic spin-down feature cannot be disabled at all due to the firmware used in the drives). And once the platters are stopped, it takes much too long for them to spin back up, .. "

As I am not interested in Raid, I take it that these consumer drives would still be OK for Video work or should I wait for further improvements and stick with Sata 2 for the time being in building a new machine now ?

I use internal consumer drives mounted in removable caddies for my video files and I was going to have them all Sata 3 drives incl. the C drive in my next build which is to be probably next week.

RonC.

Randall = how about this Raid
 

Videoguys.com - G-Tech G-SPEED eS 4TB with PCIe card

..they apparently use Hitachi drives ?!?!?

Maybe you should wait for one of these new 12-core workstations.

I also found the WD Green and Black drives to also be unsuitable for video editing work because if they spin down their platters (yes, this spin-down will occur even if Windows is still running) they will take much too long to spin back up to speed (and this will adversely affect the transfer speeds). They are fine as a system drive or a media storage drive.