Hard Drive Setup

Pachanga wrote on 7/21/2009, 8:31 PM

For a dual Quad dream system on V9 with Vista 64, what should the hard drive setup be?

Separate Disk for the Operating System? and,
Separate Disk for Rendering? and,
Separate Disk for the source material?

Is SAS worth the money versus SATA?

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/21/2009, 8:38 PM

I generally keep a relatively small (that being under 500GB these days) as the system and software drive. After that i add more drives as i need space. I don't keep any of them for any particular purpose but merely store files wherever is convenient. Some projects have source files on drive E and render to drive G. Some projects have source on F and render to F. It really doesn't make much noticeable difference.

If you want to start inexpensive then just one drive for both source and rendering is fine. You'll suffer almost no performance penalty at all.

SATA is already so much faster than typical video streams and rendering processes that you probably won't notice any improvement from using SAS. For that matter, reading video from and rendering to old PATA drives isn't noticeably slower than SATA. About the only time you'll notice any difference is when you do straight file copies from one drive to another. For regular playback and rendering purposes the drives are not even close to the bottleneck. For video the money should primarily go toward the processor to get better performance.

srode wrote on 7/22/2009, 3:31 AM

SAS isn't very cost effective by the time you buy drives and a controller card to run them - instead build a good SATA RAID array - like RAID 10 with 4 disks and add a single disk for Back ups. Put the OS and data as well as render to the RAID array - and do periodic back ups to the single disk. You'll have 2x redundancy so you never lose your work with a drive failure and you will have the speed of RAID which should be about twice as fast as the 3x single disc set up.

If you don't have room / funds for all that you could go RAID5 with only 3 disc drives instead of 5 required for my recommended set up. WD Caviar Black 640gb drives are very reliable, quiet, fast and reaonably priced with 5 year warranty and they work well in RAID.

If you want a really slick set up get a nice back plane and you can put 5 drives in 3 5.25 bays and pull your BU drive out when not in use to store somewhere safely incase you have something happen that smokes your computer like lightening etc.