Hello! So this is my first post ever, yeay!

I'm getting a new PC with the following specs:

Asus P5E3 DELUXE
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 (when they arrive)
4 GB of CORSAIR DDR3 1333MHZ CL9 (4 sticks)
two SAPPHIRE HD 3850 in Crossfire (might be overkill but maybe I can play a game or two of Crysis now and then...)
Antec P182 case
ANTEC TRUEPOWER QUATTRO 850W

And

5 x WD1600AAJS 160GB in the following configuration:

2 x in Raid 0 as the system disc.
2 x in Raid 0 for the capture and editing disc.
1 x for output.

I realise that I'm screwed with RAID 0 if the drives go boom but that is my quest for ultimate speed. I don't mind if the system disc goes boom, I can always reinstall it on new discs. WD1600AAJS aren't expensive at all here in Finland.

I also have a Lacie D2 Quaddra ESATA 500 GB as a backup disc.

So the actual question is:

How many separate drives should there be on a video editing capable system? I'll be editing what ever I can, DivX, Xvid, DV, HD if I come across some material sometime... (want to be ready for the future too)

One RAID 0 for the Windows Vista.
Should I have a different disc for installed programs also? Or can my "program files" folder be on the same disc that the windows folder is?
One separate disc for capture and editing.
And one for output.
Or can the Lacie be used as an output disc?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Bonus question: How about the memory? Will CL9 slow me down? That's a price thing and the only solution because I have to get all the components from the same store. (part payment/instalment reasons...)

Personally I have c: for windows and applications, d: and h: for video and audio, and j: for render files, all on separate drives; I also have other partitions and disks in there, but not for video editing. Avid splits the audio and video into separate files so it makes sense to put them on different disks... I alternate between d: and h: for video when capturing to disk. Other applications store video and audio in the same file, so they read both simultaneously.

I wouldn't worry about RAID unless you're editing uncompressed HD, when you'll need as much throughput as you can get. A standard hard drive is plenty fast enough for DV or HDV editing and the primary limit is seek time, not throughput; RAID won't help with seek time, but putting files on two different disks generally will.

As for memory, I'm using single-channel PC2700 for 1080i HD editing, so I doubt you'll have any problems with what you're getting .

Edit: oh, yeah, when I've been editing DV movies for other people they've typically brought me a Firewire Lacie drive so I could capture to it and output the finished movie to it as a DV file, then they take the disk away with all the files when I'm done. Works fine at the 3.5 megabytes per second that DV requires, but would be hard-pressed for uncompressed SD or low-compression HD.

^Agreed.

You might also want to consider a 10k RPM HDD for temporarily holding the file that is being edited. At least in Photoshop you can see a performance increase. Even better would be 2x 10k RPM drives in RAID

Thank you for the reply! Maybe I'll go with some WD Raptors instead.

But I would like to know a few things:

- On a system disc, which is more important: Access time or throughput? or both?

- On the editing disc, which is more important: Access time or throughput? or both?

- On the output disc, which is more important: Access time or throughput? or both?

Also, if I do RAID 0 and make a few partitions, will it be as fast as several physical discs? Or even close to it?

Never use AID0 for a system disk. Not because of crashing harddrives, but corrupted RAID drivers. You can always put the swap file on a faster drive if you need to.

Access time really, as it's regularly accessing multiple files all over the disk. Being able to read a 4kb file at 10 MB per second or 1000 MB per second really doesn't make much difference .

Throughput until you have enough to easily deal with your video files (and any current disk will have enough for DV or HDV), then access time.

Throughput, so you can write data out to it as fast as possible.

Personally I would never put the operating system on a RAID for the simple fact that it's unrelyable hence unprofessional.

By this I mean, If you've promised a client a wedding or video clip for a web site update and it needs to be ready in three days, you don't want to be rebuilding an OS drive when you should be editing.

Sure the media drives can go, but as long as you export an EDL/Capture log every night you can replace the drive, ask the program to recapture media and your off again.

In this regard I always build AID0 with as least 3 - 5 disks. Yes it increases the likelihood of corruption, but the more drives, the faster the the media, and the main reason is so I can drop down the size of the RAID but still work in RAID.

It just helps with my work practice.

That why I choose 4 x 320GB against something like 2 x 500GB. It's cheaper to do so, and means I also have spare HD's.
Just be mindful of the heat increase in your case, and keep well ventilated.

Welcome to the forum and congrats in advance on your new toy-slash-workhorse.

Getting the easy stuff out of the way first...

DDR3 is already putting you on the bleeding edge and by its nature the latencies are little further out there than the numbers you're accustomed to seeing with DDR2. CL9 isn't going to impact your experience noticably compared to far more expensive pieces.

Now let's have a chat about RAID 0...

RAID-0 on two drives is at least twice as likely to exhibit a failure as a single drive. Someone with more statistics experience can jump in and say how much more than twice, since I left the continuing education system that year, etc., but you can also add in the additional probability of interface failures plus an overall higher failure rate due to increased temperatures with so many drives in the box, etc. Also note that consumer hard drives have around twice the failure rate of enterprise hard drives.

Given that higher failure risk you have to consider the performance potential to be gained and intelligently choose the tradeoff. The anticipated performance benefits of RAID-0 do not apply to all usage patterns. For example, what will be the primary use of your new system and is that use highly dependent on seek times or on sustained transfer rates? Frequently you could instead choose a single more expensive hard drive in a given size and accomplish similar performance gains without the additional failure risk and with a beneficial compromise in heat, energy, reliability and so on. Or you could purchase larger hard drives with the same general performance numbers and experience less falloff in sustained transfer rates given the same amount of stored material (drive throughput falls off by around 50% at the full mark). Or get larger, higher performance drives and have the best of both worlds.

Finally, do a little research about that E-SATA external's performance if you want to use it for output. E-SATA is slower than SATA. Not sure if it's so much slower that it will be a bottleneck or not, but to have a look.

What will you be using for video editing? Adobe CS?

-B

I'm beginning to see that RAID 0 is unnecessary for me...

So someone pointed me to this article:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=322

Which to my mind, makes perfect sense!

But how to "partial stroke" or "quarter stroke" a drive? Make a super fast partition and a storage partition.

And I still would like to know how the drive performs with multiple partitions? Is the performance same as several physical drives?

Example if I have two 74GB Raptors or two 300GB drive that have 75GB "super fast" partitions, will the performance be close to the raptors? How will the rest of the 225GB capacity perform?

How about if I need to access the super fast partition (which I'd imagine I would as a system disc) and the 225GB storage partition. Can the drive handle reading/writing from both partitions?

Separate drives would perform faster. Remember that while the OS sees the partitions as separate drives, it is still only a single drive. If you are copying something from one 74GB drive to another, there are more read/write heads involved then if you copy from one 74GB partition to another on the same drive. I don't consider this a speed penalty per se, but its something to keep in mind.

Keep in mind that raptors are faster for several reasons. One of the most obvious is that they spin faster. 10K RPMs allows the disks to "come back around" faster then 7200RPMs. While I don't know for sure, I suspect that the raptors only use the outer edge of the platter. The outer edge of the 300GB drive might be as fast, but as it gets closer to the center, the speed will drop off.

So I've been looking around and the WD75000AAKS looks like a cool drive!

If I partition it into a 100GB system drive and a 650GB storage drive, I should be getting Raptor performance on my system drive? Just have to remember that se storage should not be accessed while I need optimal speeds.

Or should I get a 74GB Raptor for system drive?

If so here's my configuration:

- 74GB raptor as a system drive (and with program files on the same disc. Can they be on the same disc btw.?)
- 100 - 300 GB partition from one WD75000AAKS for the editing disc (I won't propably need huge amounts...)
- one WD75000AAKS as the output disc

and the Lacie QuaddraII and the 650 partition from the WD75000AAKS as a storage.

Or maybe some other configuration that you would suggest?

Propably the options are 74GB raptor or a small partition from a WD75000AAKS and 2 x WD75000AAKS drives.

So I have studied things again.

I've decided that I'm going with WD3200AAKS drives. They are cheap and I think I can get good performance out of them also.

So I'm thinking of making a 70GB or so partition to one disc. And leaving the rest of the space unformatted. And use that as a system disc.
Basically I get Raptor performance, or something near with half the price. Right?