WIndows XP is a bit of a memory hog. I suspect going up to 512 of RAM would help.

>>>
Secondary Hard Disk: EIDE 60Gb 5400 RPM (where tracks are stored). Configured as a master on an IDE bus with a CD-RW as a slave
<<<
I believe I read somewhere a long time ago that having HD and CD on same IDE caused that IDE to perform slow.
I've had good luck with Promise Ultra66 IDE card, with 4 7200 IDE's on it, Plextor CDRom and CD Burner on SCSI.
FWIW,
Rick Z

1. upgrade the track hard drive to a minimum of a 7200 with the fastest seek time possible.
2. Get the track hard drive away from the cdr, on to its own controller.
3. enable DMA on this hard drive
4. Upgrade your ram
5. get rid of the creative soundcard and upgrade to a proffesional one. (many choices in about the same $ range as creative) Creative runs native at 48k, chances are you're working at 44.1, this is a well documented issue.

This should be a good starting point, also consider running a raid array (as already mentioned) its not that expensive anymore. Another option is buying a pair of faster hard drives and splitting the tracks across them.
The one issue with raid 0 (interleaved) is the fact that if one drive fails, both drives data becomes corrupt. This is playing with fire. This is the method I use but only audio gets stored on the array and everything gets backed up fairly regularly. I would guess bgc is doing the same thing or perhaps running a pair of redundant drives. Anyways, start with a single 7200, if this isn't enough buy a second one and divide your tracks between them, if this still isn't enough try raid.
Steve S.

I'm running interleaved RAID for speed (two 7200 rpm drives = pure bliss at an affordable price). As stated above, if one goes, they're both useless so I only store my loop libraries (already on CDs) and audio and projects that I back up on this drive.
Given the high reliability of drives nowadays and my backing-up it's worth it.
I can't say enough for going RAID, it makes a tremendous difference.
B.

First you can unload half the gimmick applets that Dell doubtlessly pre-load, then run the script at www.blkviper.com to switch of the unnecessary XP processes and make you machine more efficient.

Office (Fastfinf, quickstart, etc) and AV stuff should also be disabled .

geoff

Utterly agree about the raid. I'm into my second system with raid and have only had one issue. Everything was backed up, so it was a pain, but not a disaster. The moral, of course, is ALLWAYS HAVE BACKUPS. Any hard drive can fail at any time. The IBM deskstar drives that were highly rated when they came out a couple years ago, are now starting to fail all over the place. With the speed of technology, products cannot be tested over extended periods of time to prove dependability. Don't take the manufacturers word on how long the drives going to last. Back up everything!
Steve S.

Raid and more Raid..
We are using the adaptec raid card (ATA RAID 1200A), Windows XP
Motu and Vegas 4D. Sometimes it works, sometimes it goes away,
sometimes it adds little pops and clicks, we get many errors and files
don;t want to open (at times)..If I work on the main C drive, all is fine,
or the firewire backup.

So they tell us to get rid of the raid and just use a large drive, but
on the adaptec page it says that it makes video faster? Should we try
the raid system that Windows XP offers..anybody got some ideas on this?

sparrow

Your RAID should definitely not be doing this. Either it's defective, broken or improperly configured.
I used the RAID controller built into my ASUS motherboard and it's flawless.
It is definitely worth fixing this.
B.

I also have a Dell computer pretty much the same as you have, but I have a 7200 RPM hard drive (I wouldn't ever go with a 5400). I also have 512 Mb RAM, which I think is the minimum I would go with. I also have an Audigy2 sound card. I haven't used Vegas for long, but I haven't had any problems yet. I think RAM is a big factor. I would have gone with even more if the upgrade price wasn't so high. I went with the RDRAM instead of the DDR. From what I've read it is suppose to be more efficient.

Not really sure what y'all are doing with your machines (and not sure I understand what RAID is or how it works), but, as far as multiple tracks on Vegas goes, I never have a problem. Not certain what you mean by your system being able to keep up, either.

Most of my projects involve three DV video tracks with stereo audio tracks, a master video track and master audio track and as many as three additional video tracks for FX/text. Let's see, that would be about eleven tracks - I don't experience any performance problems.

My system has only 128 mb ram, a 900 mhz processor, and five firewire drives - three maxtors (all 5400 rpm), and two ads (both 7200 rpm). Vegas doesn't seem to prefer the faster drive over the slower one - they all work fine.

I may be missing something here, but I never experience dropouts. Granted, super compex FX I have to selectively prerender to play them on the timeline smoothly prior to rendering. But, unless it's something super critical, I know what most of my FX are going to look like without having to view them in smooth playback from an unrendered timeline.

Would love to hear from some of you on this raid business. I've heard the term used often, just don't know exactly how it works - and why one drive failure would spell disaster for the entire setup. If anyone cares to share, I'm all ears.

Tx.
Caruso

Sure, I'll give it a shot.
My terminology is going to be horrendous, but I'm only going to talk in generalities. Everyone feel free to add their bit. By the way there is tons of good info on the internet, written by people much more knowledgeable than me.

Raid is a method of "combining" two or more hard drives to function as a single drive. There are many variations on raid arrays, but the biggest variation is whether you run interlaced or redundant drives, or a combination of the two.
Interlaced drives is when two or more drives are combined together with data being split up and fed to each drive in turn as if these drives were a single unit. Shows up in windows as a single hard drive, unless you set up partitions. Why do this? Strictly for hard drive performance.
The downside is that because the data is split up between multiple drives, if one hard drive becomes corrupted, all the data in this type of array becomes unusable. This is the system commonly used by av people.
Redundant drives is when multiple drives are set up to make instant back ups of data. Data streams are duplicated and sent out exactly the same to each drive. Why do this? Data security. If one drive goes down no data is lost.
Combining the two is the best of both worlds. Several drives combined, several drives backing up. Very fast, very stable. This is the method commonly used in servers, often with scsi drives that can be hot swapped without having to shut down the system because of one bad drive.
Why did I go raid? Mainly to remove one more variable from the equation.
My projects often run to 60+ tracks and have heavy editting. By using a raid array (interlaced) I never have to worry about hard drive performance.
Why not just go scsi? Probably would if I had unlimmitted money. When I compared value, performance and drive space raid was the better deal.
My latest computer has sata ability but I haven't bought any of these drives yet. Anyone wishing to comment on sata performance feel free as I have no first hand knowledge.
Hope I haven't made too many glaring errors,
Steve S.

http://www.twincom.com/raid.html

Good link.
Steve S.

Thanks for the info, Cold, and good link, BGC. Further questions. What performance gain do you see using a RAID? What sort of system must you have to take advantage of that performance gain?

For most of what I do in Vegas, I don't see a lot of disk activitiy during editing - limitations for me might be jerky video preview from the timeline after much editing and addition of FX. Disk activity only occurs as I'm rendering.

I use a combination of Wavelab 4.0 and Vegas 4.0. In terms of audio, I'm much more comfortable editing two-channel, single track stuff in WL, way more comfortable combining multi-track stuff in Vegas, although, if determined, either program could probably do it all (WL's montage can do similar non-destructive multi-track - but, I like V4 that seems much more intuitive to me.

In terms of performance, It seems my system is fine for audio - and I'm not certain what faster drives would give me in terms of video - a faster processor/FSB/more and faster RAM, etc. perhaps. Most of the intensive stuff involves rendering of complex video - and I'm guessing that my real bottleneck is somewhere upstream of the drives. Always happy for comments from those with more expertise than me, however.

Thanks again for the info.

Caruso

If you're not having any issues, why change anything? A raid array should give you almost twice the speed of a single drive. For more specific info do a search, there is a bunch of people out there who have done benchmarks. I don't deal with video very often, so I can't help with specifics, but considering decent quality video runs at a high bit rate, if you're running multiple streams... But again, if you're not having issues. Perhaps post a question in the video forum and see what they have to say.
Steve S.