Hard Disk optimization - media and temp file locations

R0cky wrote on 5/12/2005, 12:08 PM
I have 3 hard disks, one of which is considerably faster than the other 2 as it's RAID 0.

One has the system files.
2 other available for media and temp files, one of whom is the RAID drive.

What is the best way to maximize performance by the location of media files, Vegas temp files, network render temp files, Sound Forge media and temp files etc?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/12/2005, 12:38 PM
RAID makes no difference on a single drive, so don't bother taking that into consideration when choosing the drives. In fact, RAID is pretty much meaningless and useless unless used on multiple drives.

Leave all software on the system drive. Put all the files necessary for a current project on one of the other drives, then render to the remaining drive. Probably the temp files can go on the same drive as the project files, but i wouldn't worry about it too much. Temp files tend to be small and accessed rarely.
R0cky wrote on 5/12/2005, 2:26 PM
You misunderstood me, my RAID 0 drive IS 2 drives, for a total of 4 actual drives- since it's RAID 0 it looks like one drive. 1 - system drive, 2 - single data drive, 3 - RAID 0 drive

It's measured performance is around 2x the single drives in my system as you'd expect.

My question is really, which files should go on the fast drive: media, temp files, network render temp files, rendered output for both Vegas and Sound Forge and which should go on the normal speed drive?

Note that the system files are on a separate drive already.
R0cky wrote on 5/12/2005, 3:21 PM
one more thing: when doing network renders the temp files are basically an AVI render even if the final will be mpg, Thus, the temp files are very large so disk bandwidth for them could be an issue if the network is fast e.g. 1000BT.
Chienworks wrote on 5/12/2005, 7:00 PM
Ahh, but you *said* three drives, one of which was on the RAID channel. Had you said four drives, two of which are RAID 0 and look like a single drive .... ;)

Well, unless you're rendering straight DV to straight DV or straight uncompressed to straight uncompressed with absolutely no effects, titles, fades, transitions, compositing, etc., the drive speed isn't really that much of a concern. For straight renders all Vegas does is copy the frames from one file to another so the drive speed comes into play. But, you'll get faster performance reading from one drive and writing to another than if both the source and output were on the same drive. And since you have one RAID array and one regular drive, it doesn't make much difference which direction the copying process is going. Keeping source and output on the RAID drive will be slower than using the other drive. What you'll end up doing for optimum performance in your configuration is basically jumping back and forth from one drive to the other.

When you are encoding to a different format or adding effects, titles, fades, etc., the bottleneck will be the processor speed, not the hard drives. You probably won't get noticeably better performance in these cases from your RAID array than you would from an old ATA33 drive.

So, as long as you avoid putting media files on the system drive, it probably doesn't matter much at all which of the other drives you do put them on.