Hard Drives

[loopyloops]

What's the best sysem config - specifically hard drives for working with DV?
I.e., 2 36 gb raptors in raid zero for programs and os and 2 72gb raptors in a mirrored array for data...

[andkiich]

I use a striped RAID for OS and captures. I'm running two 120GB drives at the moment.

[loopyloops]

I use a striped RAID for OS and captures. I'm running two 120GB drives at the moment.

What would your ultimate config be?

[dmonty]

If you use your PC mostly for video then set your stripes to the largest size. This would work better for you since video requires heavy sequential read/writes. A larger stripe size allows your PC to retrieve more data in a single pass. For example: In theory a 64K strip would return 4x more data than a 16K stripe during a single pass. Please note that while this is great for video or large files its slow for most apps. For office apps and games you might want to stick with a 16k or 32k stripe.

I also recommend that you use identical hard drives for the greatest increase in performance. While it is not necessary, your disk array capacity will be equal to the number of drives times the smallest drive. Also speed of the array will depend on the speed of the slowest hard drive. So if you built your array from spare parts you might want to upgrade.

If you have the room you might want to add another HD or RAID array to serve as a 'dump' for your movies. This should increase speed even further because I/O does not need to be performed by the same drive or array. Example: a video source on drive 'c:' that is being sequentially read and written to drive 'd:'

Hope this helps,

D

[redwudz]

I used a RAID 0 setup for my OS a year ago and had too many problems. I now use a 80G IDE drive for OS and programs and the 160G RAID 0 (64K stripe) for video work. Also have another 80G in a removable rack for backup and extras. What I've seen recommended is a small HD, maybe 36G for the OS, so it will be easy to restore and reformat as needed. I mess with my system a lot and usually end up reformating twice a year to clean out the crap. It's a lot faster to reformat a 36G than a 160G. RAID 0 can crash, even though it recovers easily, and I learned not to keep my OS on it. I also never keep anything I can't afford to lose on it. Just temporary video files before I burn them. I don't have to defrag my RAID that often, because I erase the files as soon as I burn them. I got away from software capturing and went to a ADVC-100 so my RAID is probably overkill. I have checked it with SISANDRA and it is quite a bit faster than my regular IDE drive. If you are capturing through a video card a fast drive is good, but a faster processor and memory is better. It also helps to set your video programs, whenever possible, to use your RAID for scratch storage and cache storage.

[loopyloops]

I used a RAID 0 setup for my OS a year ago and had too many problems. I now use a 80G IDE drive for OS and programs and the 160G RAID 0 (64K stripe) for video work. Also have another 80G in a removable rack for backup and extras. What I've seen recommended is a small HD, maybe 36G for the OS, so it will be easy to restore and reformat as needed. I mess with my system a lot and usually end up reformating twice a year to clean out the crap. It's a lot faster to reformat a 36G than a 160G. RAID 0 can crash, even though it recovers easily, and I learned not to keep my OS on it. I also never keep anything I can't afford to lose on it. Just temporary video files before I burn them. I don't have to defrag my RAID that often, because I erase the files as soon as I burn them. I got away from software capturing and went to a ADVC-100 so my RAID is probably overkill. I have checked it with SISANDRA and it is quite a bit faster than my regular IDE drive. If you are capturing through a video card a fast drive is good, but a faster processor and memory is better. It also helps to set your video programs, whenever possible, to use your RAID for scratch storage and cache storage.

So, are you saying a 36gb raptor with the os and striped 72gb raptors with the editing program (capture to that, edit there) on it would be good?

[dmonty]

[/quote]
So, are you saying a 36gb raptor with the os and striped 72gb raptors with the editing program (capture to that, edit there) on it would be good?[/quote]

It would work very well.

[redwudz]

Loopyloops: You mention DV. With DV, an ultrafast HD is not a necessity. If you have the money to spend, go with a fast processor and fast memory. I have a system I like for what I do. The speed is a combination of a Nvida subsystem on board, along with a AMD XP2500 Barton CPU and fast memory. I went from a XP1800 and DDR PC2100 memory. I almost halved my encoding time, a result of the newer CPU, faster memory and a good match to the motherboard. For video board capturing, a fast drive is good, but for encoding, it doesn't make near as much difference as a fast processor and fast memory..

[holistic]

What's the best sysem config - specifically hard drives for working with DV?

There is NO best. The drives you mentioned are minimal (capacity wise) for video NLE work. A large (160Gb PLUS ATA133) drive is more than up to the task.
DV = ~3.7MegaBYTES / second.
RAID 0 - think not
RAID 1 - for a business YES makes sense . For personal use it is over kill.

[loopyloops]

What's the best sysem config - specifically hard drives for working with DV?

There is NO best. The drives you mentioned are minimal (capacity wise) for video NLE work. A large (160Gb PLUS ATA133) drive is more than up to the task.
DV = ~3.7MegaBYTES / second.
RAID 0 - think not
RAID 1 - for a business YES makes sense . For personal use it is over kill.

Why no raid 0?

[loopyloops]

Loopyloops: You mention DV. With DV, an ultrafast HD is not a necessity. If you have the money to spend, go with a fast processor and fast memory. I have a system I like for what I do. The speed is a combination of a Nvida subsystem on board, along with a AMD XP2500 Barton CPU and fast memory. I went from a XP1800 and DDR PC2100 memory. I almost halved my encoding time, a result of the newer CPU, faster memory and a good match to the motherboard. For video board capturing, a fast drive is good, but for encoding, it doesn't make near as much difference as a fast processor and fast memory..

Ram & CPU wise, this system has an xp3000+ and 2 sticks of corsair xms pc3200 in dual channel. The mobo is a k7n2-l delta ilsr (msi).

So, if I was to do a bit of overkill on the drives, would having the editig program on the raid 0 and the os on another drive be the way to go?

[Gazorgan]

SATA over raid. That is if you can find decent SATA drives and have a good controller. Unless your capping in RAW video, it's more than fast enough (fast enough for raw, but that's beside the point).

[loopyloops]

SATA over raid. That is if you can find decent SATA drives and have a good controller. Unless your capping in RAW video, it's more than fast enough (fast enough for raw, but that's beside the point).

I was gonna use sata drives in raid 0

[Gazorgan]

Does anyone need to capture at 80 MBps? That's a DVD bitrate of 640,000? SATA can exceed the latest SCSI performance, for 1/3 the price. Great article on Toms Hardware last week on this very subject here: http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031114/index.html

[Wetmonkey]

ive just swapped over to 2 wd360 raptors and have been very pleased with the improvements. Iam debating on wether to swap my os over to a raid sata or just a 74 raptor. The 74 raptors are still a lil high. Iam running a 3000 xp with 1.5 gig 3200.
i picked up my raptors from newegg.com

[loopyloops]

ive just swapped over to 2 wd360 raptors and have been very pleased with the improvements. Iam debating on wether to swap my os over to a raid sata or just a 74 raptor. The 74 raptors are still a lil high. Iam running a 3000 xp with 1.5 gig 3200.
i picked up my raptors from newegg.com

Are the 2 raptors in raid o?

[LeTrout]

The video capture and playback rates quoted by some here are largely irrelevant for this discussion. Any decent modern hard drive can capture DV rate or playback a video (though full-frame raw could get tight for some drives, especially toward the end of the drive). Ever open a 10 GB MPEG-2 in Vdub and watch it parsse the file? Or mux/demux that file? Or watch TMPEGEnc crank out a temporary WAV file when encoding? I've often wished for more performance than my ATA-100 (or 133 fwiw) can deliver.

I've played around with this some and found best performance with RAID-0 on two drives installed on separate controllers (not two channels of the same controller). Consumer-grade RAID controllers (like my Highpoint 372) aren't the best imo, you're better off dropping $30 for another controller card. on a 2GB partition on the front of the drive, I got roughly 40MB/sec with one drive, 60MB/sec with two drives of the same controller in RAID-0, 80 MB/sec on two drives on separate controllers in RAID-0. I suspect you're getting close to the practical limit of the PCI bus at that point. I did the same-controller RAID-0 test both with the Highpoint doing the RAID, and with the OS (Win2k, never got around to repeating under Linux but would expect the same) doing the RAID. CPU impact was minimal in both, and performance was indistinguishable.

If I had my PC to build over again, I'd put two drives on two separate ATA controllers in it. I'd RAID-0 a filesystem across the two drives for my video working area. And my Everquest install, jeez that works the drive. I probably would put stuff that's tougher to lose (the OS filesystem, finished video, etc) on non-RAID (at leats not RAID-0) filesystems for safety. I've lost a couple drives in my life.

Haven't tried SATA or uber-SCSI, my comments may not apply to those.

[redwudz]

Final thoughts: I don't recommend the OS on a RAID 0 drive(s). If you can get programs like video capture, editing and the like to run on a RAID drive that doesn't contain the OS, go for it. I have SATA on my board, but don't use it. A non-raid SATA OS drive would be a good setup. I like the idea of a large RAID 0 (150-300G) for storing temporary video files and a small OS drive (30-50G) to enable easier reformating when you screw up your system like I do occasionally by trying new programs. I also like a large backup drive (80-160G) to dump files to that I don't trust to survive on my RAID 0 drive. I use RAID 0 as a scratch/cache drive, nothing there I can't afford to lose. SATA appears to be a low cost alternative to SCSI, with the drives becoming more available and cheaper. It all comes down to what you want your machine to do. If you already have a fast processor and memory, go for faster drives. If your primary work is to encode video, a fast processor is better. If your primary work is to edit video, fast drives are as important as a fast processor.

[lordsmurf]

I don't recommend RAID for video work, especially not RAID 0. I've seen too many problems in that configuration.

I'm perfectly happy with my half-terabyte Ultra ATA (IDE) 7200rpm 4-drive configuration. I chose to build it this way, and love it.

[Wetmonkey]

yes the drives are raid 0 i have the asus A7N8x Deluxe board with onboard SATA and raid. Very nice board with 5.1 audio and a whole lot more. Does anyone here have raptors? and what are they running? iam interested in how the tossing in another raptor would improve times when i image my OS over. I built a 7200 rpm WD SATA system and noticed a peppy improvement on install times and data retrieval.

[loopyloops]

yes the drives are raid 0 i have the asus A7N8x Deluxe board with onboard SATA and raid. Very nice board with 5.1 audio and a whole lot more. Does anyone here have raptors? and what are they running? iam interested in how the tossing in another raptor would improve times when i image my OS over. I built a 7200 rpm WD SATA system and noticed a peppy improvement on install times and data retrieval.

Why don't you put your OS on a 36 raptor?

[Wetmonkey]

yeah i have been thinking about it, the 74 gig the best ive seen is 299 compared to 110 each that i got my 36's. from what ive been reading it seem like a good decision to use a smaller drive for the OS anyways. there nice drive's too 5 year etbf.

[SLICK RICK]

I have 2 x 200GB hard drives set up as just that- 2 x 200GB. When I am converting a video file I go from one drive to the other. I also have a 120GB hard drive for OS and everything else but the two 200GB are strictly for video.

SLICK RICK

[gminnick]

Are there any benchmarks on how fast a cpu should be able to compress a file with a given set of parameters? And then use that to compare to current drive speeds so you can see how fast a drive you would need to keep it from being the bottleneck? It would be nice to see something that says if you use Divx at 4000 bitrate a 3.0GHz cpu will compress at between x and y bits/sec. For instance, if I did the calculations right, I can compress a 10GB avi using TMPGEnc in 2-4hrs depending on the options using an AMD 1.2MHz. That equates to 1MB/s to .69MB/s that is getting processed. Way below current disk speeds. I am guessing a 3.0GHz would still be the bottleneck.
I like what one person said above about faster cpu over disk speed for compressing. Makes sense. And the other recommendations for stripe size and also keeping a disk defragged seems disk speed would not be much of an issue for capturing either.