Video Editing: SCSI or SATA2

[areaman]

Hey guys,
I'm building a Video Editing system for my boss and we've run into a snag. His old system ran SCSI drives and he is worried that he would have diminished performance with SATA. Now I'm not sure if the fastest SATA will be enough for him. What do you guys think?

 

[cah027]

What type of SCSi is it? U320 or U160 ?

I have U160 and the SATA2 would be much faster. All of my HD bench marks are a lot slower than the new SATA benchmarks.

 

[areaman]

Yeah it believe it's the U160.

 

[cah027]

Yeah it believe it's the U160.

Then I would say SATA all the way!

Go with at least two drives maybe 3. One for OS , one for video source and one for output to encode to.

 

[mllrtm]

You want to have some sort of Raid. At least Striped if you are trying to save money.

I do video editing daily, and I have a Raid 5 (Parity) array with 4 Rapter 10,000 RPM! It screams

Then another set of drives for scratch disks and they the OS drive.

 

[hsarc]

Just make sure they are the VelociRaptor drives.

 

[Shadow703793]

Just make sure you get a 7200.11 SATA2 drive. The 7200.11 is almost as fast as the old Raptors (not the VelociRaptors). Put that in RAID and you are set.

 

[4745454b]

If you have the $$$ for SCSI, then you have the $$$ for high drive AID0. Get a nice large 7200.10/11 drive for OS and data. Then get 4 other drives and set them up in AID0. As long as your not on an Nvidia chipset, you should see 200MB read/write scores. How fast was his SCSI setup?

 

[knickle]

You haven't provided any details. It's hard to make a recommendation without knowing the software, video formats, etc.. If all your boss is doing is 5 minute training videos at 320x240, then a 5 year old computer with a single PATA drive would work perfectly fine.

The first thing I would do is figure out which software is being used, then hit up their website to see the recommended system configuration. Once you know what the minimum or recommended requirements are, you can go from there.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Totally agree with knickle ...

The type of editing you're doing and the software you're using determines the system requirements. Editing standard DV with Premiere Pro works fine on SATA drives, no RAID required. Editing 4:2:2 uncompressed HD on Avid Media Composer requires a Fibre Channel array with SAS drives. It all depends.