High Dollar Harddrive rigs

Starwipe wrote on 5/2/2003, 11:40 AM
Not that I can afford one at this point or do I probally need one for what I am doing,but I was wondering if the systems from Medea or the A/V SAN fibre drive's offer anything if you are using Vegas. I know they have a faster max data rate that is needed for un-compressed Video, but how would I bennifit from a system like that besides the mass storage? Would render times be a huge difference?

Is anyone using Vegas and one of these?

Thanks,
Chris

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 5/2/2003, 12:12 PM
The speed of your typical IDE drive is plenty fast enough. Using a super fast drive won't help with rendering speed. At least nothing you'd really notice. The issue is almost all due to CPU cycles. Until there is a dramatic breakthrough in CPU speed, rendering times will be slow. To get an idea how hard your CPU is working while rendering...

Before starting a rendering if you're using XP, bring up Task Manager, Ctrl/Alt/Delete. Now click on the VIEW tab, then press Select Columns. From the list check I/O read byes and I/O write bytes. Start to render. About 80% of the way through go back to Task Manager and from the processes tab note the HUGE number shown for Vegas as far as how many bytes read. Right now, mine is at just about 40 billion. That's why rendering takes as long as it does.
kilroy wrote on 5/2/2003, 12:13 PM

Rendering times end up being mostly attributed to CPU cycles, efficient software etc. Where these drives deliver is in the area of high sustained I/O rates, as you have mentioned. In so much that efficient file I/O reduces the strain on the host system, you can expect more reliability and system integrity, which *should*, and typically does, provide an overall performance "boost". The level at which this improvement is what one would call an impressive boost is a matter only you can decide.

Also, these things are not cheap, and the best ones require a special optical PCI card to interface with, so you have to have a spare slot available.

Finally, and most importantly, if your requirements are reasonably modest with respect to the number of tracks (video and/or audio) you will be playing back at once, I personally wouldn't see any advantage to the exotic drives over other solutions. If you have lots of tracks, and your system is balls to the wall, or you have other people in your offices that need to share access to the files, then these systems make sense. Another issue is the portability factor, you unhook the thing and away you go. Of course, where you are taking it to will need to have a compatible interface.
d1editor wrote on 5/2/2003, 1:01 PM
Starwipe,
Take what BillyBoy and Kilroy said here to heart. I opted for 2 drives as my video drives and then raided them for faster throughput. These were 2- 120 gig Western Digital Caviar drives...my motherboard supports rain functionality and I experience very good render times ...
Mike