Eliminating USB drive improved stability

dxdy wrote on 1/15/2012, 12:51 PM
About a week ago, my previously solid VPro 11 R511 became unstable. I couldn't edit in 64 bit, and I couldn't render MP4s with or without GPU. I would have sworn that I had changed nothing...but I had.

Inadvertently, I had moved some of my source files to a USB 2 drive. When I discovered the move, I got them all back to the internal source drive, and things turned around quite dramatically - several hours of editing and rendering and no grey screens of death.

Could Vegas have been having trouble spinning up a drive that had gone to sleep?

I wish I had time to experiment with it some more, but my deadline looms in 4 days, and I have to get these two videos done.

Projects are 2 tracks of AVCHD 1920, 100 or so JPG and PNG photos, 4 tracks of audio, a track of text subtitiles.

Stock speed i7-950, 12 GB RAM, Nvidia 560ti with 1GB DDR5, separate internal SATA drives for OS and source files, ESATA drive for outputs. Win 7 Home Premium fully patched.

Comments

larry-peter wrote on 1/15/2012, 1:06 PM
I think your hunch is correct about trouble accessing the drive immediately. Even though my system settings are to never allow drives to sleep, my G-Speed 2TB drive where I keep my source footage will go to "sleep" rather quickly. If I don't assure the drive (eSATA connected) is active by moving the playhead on the timeline before rendering, I have had issues with bad frames during rendering and crashes. It's now become a habit to do this.
musicvid10 wrote on 1/15/2012, 4:44 PM
"Could Vegas have been having trouble spinning up a drive that had gone to sleep?"
My big impression of off-the-shelf USB drives is that they're poorly ventilated.
After a while of hard editing my WD model slowed down to nothing or stopped completely. I eventually figured out that it was going into thermal protection, and with a new "home" with a little fan, it works like a champ even with intense multimedia tasks. All in all, firewire or external sata is going to be more dependable, though
Laurence wrote on 1/16/2012, 8:51 AM
I have no problem using USB drives in Vegas 10 and earlier and doubt that my problems in 11 have much to do with the format of my drives. Most of my crashes in V11 happen during things like title editing which have nothing to do with drive throughput.

I do most of my work on external USB-3 drives and they are just fine.
ritsmer wrote on 1/16/2012, 9:55 AM
On my machine the USB-2 connections work well - until I attach a USB-HDD, that is.
Then after about 1 hour the keyboard (!!) disconnects - and a little later the mouse says bye-bye too.
If I leave a USB-HDD connected for a whole night I have to unplug the power next morning (as the machine does not even respond to its power button any more)...

When I make backups I have to go via the house-ethernet to the very same USB HDDs connected to a laptop - so the problem is not the USB-HDDs.

So, yes - USB can provoke some quite strange issues.
Butch Moore wrote on 1/16/2012, 11:36 AM
I agree to all the above! I maintain several USB drives for storage, but I now copy active projects to my internal E: drive before attempting complicated edits. Not sure why...but it does seem to help.
Geoff_Wood wrote on 1/16/2012, 11:51 AM
" ... not sure why ...."

Because USB2 is a bottleneck In comparison with USB3 , IDE, and SATA ! And a flakey bottleneck at that, with all sorts of accesses unrelated to the streaming of data going on continuously.

geoff