I have used a raid with vegas, I did not notice any difference between my main disks and the raids. However, I never put it thru a testing situation. It worked fine.

Your "pops" & Jitters" sound more like either too little RAM or video card performance/RAM. Tuning off the WInxp bells & whistles can also free up RAM and performance.

phil

I'm using raid 0 with 2-120GB Western Digital drives that have the 8 MB cache. My reaction to this implementation is totally subjective, but I am more satisfied with the results than before when I used a single 120 GB drive. Large projects load much more quickly. I do find using larger chunk size (128) smooths the process. I too am using an Asus board with a 2500 Athlon XP processor. You didn't mention how much Ram you have installed. I have 1GB, but I'm thinking about getting another GB while it's cheap. This makes a tremendous difference. I tend to agree your clicks and pops sound like more ram would be a better solution if you in fact have less than 512.

Good luck,

Bob

It all depends on what video format you're using. If you capture and edit in DV, RAID is not needed. If you are capturing in uncompressed format, then you need some serious disk speed.

You didn't say what video format you are capturing. If it is DV, then disk drive speed, per se, should not cause clicks, pops, dropped frames, etc.

I've had two disasters with RAID 0 and have given it the flck. It's just too risky as you're doubling the risk of loosing everything. Plus the speedup is rather illusionary from what I can determice as CPU processing is involved.

A real RAID 0 or 0+1 where the controller makes the whole thing tranparent to WIndoz would be a different matter. I'll admit the biggest plus was having so much contiguous space but having had it hiccup more than once with a total loss of data from both drives wasn't a nice experience. Now this could be just my bad luck but when I mentioned this issue here quite a few people had similar tales of woe.

Actually, a pretty good argument can be made for keeping them as two separate drives. The fastest transfer rates are achieved when copying a file from one physical drive to another. The slowest transfer rates happen when copying a file to another file on the same physical drive. This is because the heads on the drive must seek all over the place reading the data from one part of the drive and then writing it to another part of the drive. Head seeking is pretty darn slow and Vegas, by its nature, does a lot of it. (Particularly if all your source files are on one drive and you render to the same drive.) While a RAID striped-set can transfer data faster to and from the computer, setting up a RAID doesn't necessarily speed up the seek times by much, if at all. Also, when copying a file to the same drive, RAID isn't significantly faster than a single drive either.

Try copying a large file from one physical drive to another (and this doesn't mean between two partitions on the same drive) and see how long it takes. Then, copy, not move, that same file to another folder on the same drive and see how long that takes. Multiple, single drives can speed up your workflow, if you use a file-management strategy that maximizes those occasions when Vegas will be copying data from one file to another on a different drive.

When Vegas is rendering, basically one of two things is happening; it is either simply copying marked segments from the source files, unmodified, to the rendered file, or it is applying a filter, title or transition and then compressing this new footage to the rendered file. It is only when copying unmodified video that the transfer rate of the drive really become significant and it is best, in this case, to use two physical drives instead of a single drive or a RAID striped-set. If most of your footage needs to be rendered, then a RAID isn't going to help here either since the actual rendering is so much slower than the transfer rate of even the slowest hard drive.

James

Or do what I do and have two Raid0 :-)

Greedy bugger aren't I?

I capture to a 2x200 Gig Raid0 on a PCI raid controller and render to a 2x120 Gig onboard SATA Raid0.

I wanted plenty of headroom on the drives for future-proofing and also so I can be running other applications while capturing.rendering without fear of dropping frames...

Let's face it, they aren't expensive these days, not compared to the $4000 I paid for the two 70Gig SCSIs attached to the Perception in the same box. I figure when drive speed is so cheap these days, make it as fast as you can.

Cheers

The other issue with RAID 0 is heat. All the time both drives are being worked, if you'e only got one RAID array then the head servos are beeing pushed backwards and forwards. With two separate drives they do much less work.

I have to agree with farss. The speed is unnecessary and will only give a marginal increase in overall speed if at all. The drives are almost certain to fail earlier and when one goes, the other is useless as is the data. The chance for system error is increased and you have also added one more factor to the troubleshooting process and a nebulous one at that (difficult to point the finger at unless you reconfigure as separate drives with no other changes and reformat them and you STILL can't say 100% that you have found the answer).

John

I agree with John and Farss too. While the last several boxes I build had RAID build it the first thing I did was disable it. If you're getting one of the newer ultra fast drives anyways than run on a seperate 133 IDE controller use it! You can have 8 devices this way... no sweat.

Right now my favorite configuration is:

Primary IDE channel... med size hard drive two partitions, Master, 1st partition just for Windows and applications, second for the swap file only. Secondary channel a larger drive, used for overflow, mostly empty my DVD burner is a slave.

On the 133 controller card I use only the master on each channel each connected to its own removable drawer. These I use to swap drives in an out at will and all projects get rendered here, print to tape here, use to burn DVD from and so on.