Best setup to render to 2nd disk is ? Tmp files ?

will-3 wrote on 7/19/2008, 4:29 AM
1 - I had heard that it was better to...
... install a 2nd internal hard drive
... so that vegas was running on the system drive
... and your project was on the 2nd drive

2 - So I installed a 2nd internal hard drive...
... but Vegas doesn't seem to render much faster.

3 - Are their any tricks I may have missed or skipped?
... does Vegas render 1st to some tempoary file?
... If so is there a way in 'preferences' to control which drive that is?
... If so is it better to have Vegas put the tempoary render files on the 2nd disk?

4 - The compute I'm using (PC w/XP Home) had two ribbon cables
... one has the CD/DVD on it
... the 2nd has the system disk (drive c:) plugged in to the connector on the extream end of the cable
... I put the 2nd disk drive on the 2nd connector on the ribbon cable with the system disk.
... I thought I had heard that it is better to have each hard disk on a seperate ribbon cable... but not sure... and that would mean installing a hard disk controller card... as there are no more connectors on the mother board for hard disk in this PC.
... What is the 'best' way to install the 2nd hard disk inside a PC for quickest rendering?

Thanks for any comments and suggestions.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/19/2008, 4:38 AM
I had showed an experiment a while ago whereby people could determine easily just how much time they might be likely to save by having an optimal drive arrangement for rendering. A few folks tried it and the time savings was usually on the order of a few seconds for each hour of rendering time.

Hard drive configuration is way way way down on the list of things that affect rendering time in any significant way. If you want to speed up rendering get a faster processor. This makes much more difference than everything else you can do combined.
farss wrote on 7/19/2008, 5:08 AM
Sounds to me like you've got a fairly old mobo with only IDE. Might be time to think about a new mobo and CPU, that alone will speed things up and then you should have plenty of SATA ports for all the disks you desire.
As Chienworks rightly points out for normal DV or HDV editing disks aren't a significant factor however I like to have more than one apart from the system drive at least. Then you've got somewhere logical to keep the semi-permanant files that you might use on more than one project. Also do watch out for where Vegas puts it's temporary files by default.

Bob.
will-3 wrote on 7/19/2008, 5:21 AM
Before I was often rendering to a USB 2.0 external drive.

I've heard different reports on this...

One is that USB 2.0 is faster than the actual read/write speed of the disk.. so the disk was really the liminting factor.

This article on internal transfer rate... http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/perf/spec/transMedia-c.html
reports that a 7200 rpm drive can transfer about 220 Mb/s...

And USB 2.0 is 400 Mb/s... so it would seem that an external USB hard drive should be able to run just as fast as an internal drive...

Or for SATA drives... from...
http://ask.metafilter.com/81353/External-vs-internal-hard-drives-and-speed

"While USB 2 and Firewire 400 are indeed slower than the 3.0Gbps that Serial ATA supports, a typical 7200 RPM SATA hard drives top out at about 50-75 megabytes/s (400-600Mbps) for sequential writes. This means that the fastest the hard drive can go when writing a stream of data isn't much faster than what you can stuff over USB or Firewire. "

But, maybe I'm looking at the wrong data... do you guys think internal is much faster than external for hard disk rendering?

winrockpost wrote on 7/19/2008, 5:44 AM
Will , if you want faster renders it is real simple with vegas,, horsepower ....faster processor pure and simple,
drives as pointed out already is not going to do it
Chienworks wrote on 7/19/2008, 5:45 AM
Much faster? Technically yes, for file transfer speeds. In practice no. Rarely do you ever sustain such tremendous write speeds for more than a few moments at a time, and certainly not in a rendering situation.

What i do find though is that in the long run internal drives are much more trouble-free. I've had enough headaches with external drives that i simply do not use them in a live working situation at all anymore. They're great for offline storage or transporting huge amounts of data. I wouldn't ever work from one though.
farss wrote on 7/19/2008, 7:21 AM
a) USB 2 uses quite a bit of CPU power, if you have to use external firewire is better.
b) Doing a null render from one AVI to another I find internal drives are faster than external. Whilst it's probably true that the drives aren't much faster then the theoretical bitrate of USB 2 keep in mind that not all that goes down USB 2 or firewire is just that data from/to the drive. I'd also ask how current is that information, HDDs are going faster and faster. Another point to consider. I sometimes use Firewire 800 to connect external drives and that is faster than using Firewire 400. If the theory was correct I shouldn't see any improvement.

In general you need to be a tad suspicious about a lot of claims you can read. For example Gigabit Ethernet can move close to what it says it can if you use the top shelf controllers connected to the right bus on the mobo however more often than not that isn't the case or else while it can move the data at that speed the CPU is locked out of it's own busses. Editing and rendering video is one of the few things that has dual perfromance needs / bottlenecks. You are moving large amounts of data and doing large numbers of calculations on that data and all at the same time. The amount of data being moved swamps any caching in general. So one thing or the other will be a bottleneck. Mostly it's the CPU however for me at times it can be the disk system that cannot keep up.

Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 7/19/2008, 3:10 PM
This subject comes up ever 2-3 months. Here's the last thread (I'm linking to my post rather than the beginning of the thread):

Media on Separate Drive?

Most of what Kelly (Chienworks) says above is true, but as you'll see in the link above, I mildly disagree, but only when doing certain, specific types of projects.

There are dozens of other threads about the same subject, if you search a little.

[edited to make the link work]

[edit]

Here's another link:

File organization with VP8. What folders


and one more:

Dual Hard Disk Surprising Results
JohnnyRoy wrote on 7/19/2008, 5:18 PM
What Kelly and John are saying is that it depends on the project and type of render. As a general rule of thumb, take a look at your hard drive light during a render. If it's on solid, it looks like you might be I/O bound and you can probably benefit from reconfiguring drives. It's it's flashing on and off, you are CPU bound and your drives don't matter. Go buy a more powerful CPU.

~jr
johnmeyer wrote on 7/19/2008, 10:04 PM
Very succinct, JohnnyRoy.
Steve Mann wrote on 7/19/2008, 10:24 PM
"And USB 2.0 is 400 Mb/s... so it would seem that an external USB hard drive should be able to run just as fast as an internal drive.."

The data rate for USB2 (Firewire and any other physical media) is the theoretical, design speed and only replicated in a lab. (Sort of like your car's gas mileage).

Also, the ATA disk spec is 100 Mbps, so it really doesn't matter if you use USB or Firewire for data speed alone. USB has to have the processor involved in every byte coming over the bus, while Firewire is a DMA transfer. The processor tells the controller: 'here is the source and destination addresses, now you guys go ahead and move the data without me, and interrupt me when your are finished'. Firewire has far less overhead requirements of the processor, so for a processor intensive application like Vegas, Frewire is the preferred transport.

Further, where is your PC's Firewire connected? Many are on the PCI bus, which has its' own 133Mbps speed limit.

Also, on disk drive speed specs - read the fine print. Those high hundreds of Mbps data rates are the burst speed. Not the sustained data rate. Small files that are typical of home users or office communications can transfer all the data in the RAM buffer. The duration of the burst speed rate is how long it takes to transfer the RAM buffer data. Larger files, such as video events, are far larger than the drives RAM buffer, so you will be throttled to the sustained data rate, which is usually lower than 100 Mbps.