Just install as the installation program suggests - in the normal Windows program folder(s). So you can ensure, that plugins and add-ons can install correctly later.

Use different physical disks - or at least different logical disks for media and for render to as Windows does not fancy reading and writing to the same logical disk at the same time - so it takes longer time. much longer.

@Ulf: enjoing the nice weather that we finally got ? :- )

Ok. That's what I figured, and I've installed it on the same C: drive as Windows (got a 500GB drive so plenty of space).

Q: Render on the same external SATA as the project media and files? Or will it signficantly lower render times to move rendering onto yet another drive?

Currently, as I write, I'm rendering a relatively simple timeline of 47 minutes and it's showing a total time to finish as 68 minutes. That seems "reasonable". Right?

All Quad Cores show fully engaged. Memory useage overall at 4.47 GBs, which argues for at least a 6GB RAM setup on 64 bit. I have a PDF open, and of course a couple of browsers windows too. Paging is negligible.

8 GBs RAM, HP Quad Core AMD Athalon II X4 620 Processor 2.60 GHz
64 Bit W7 w/Vegas 9.0e 64.

Optimized for performance in Control Panel > System settings. All "pretties" turned off.

Maybe this is a good FAQ 'sticky' for forum use?

Good question. People have reported varying results on this. The question is whether to keep all the content and rendering on one drive, or access the project and media from one drive and render to a second drive. With fast sata drives, the relative differences may not be large enough to concern yourself with, but you will need to do your own tests since some people do report differences. The one exception "may" be if you will be reading / writing very large uncompressed video files.

In the vast majority of cases, The CPU / Codec interaction is the speed bottleneck, not the relative or theoretical throughput of various drive setups.

@Ulf: enjoing the nice weather that we finally got ? :- )

Sure thing Einar :-)

/Ulf

my desktop: 3 internal drives - OS, source files, render

my laptop: OS, source files; external USB or FW drives for render. or external source/render drives.

Optimized for performance in Control Panel > System settings. All "pretties" turned off.

This doesn't matter - unless you play around a lot while rendering.

What gives a few percent more speed, however - and no cons with a quad machine - is to select "Adjust for best performance of Background services" under advanced performance options. - In the single-core-processor days it was urgent to have small timeslices to avoid i.e. hacking mouse movements - with a quad processor there is always one processor ready so the timeslices can be longer - and this saves the overhead changing from thread to thread to often.

Naa - it's fundamental basic knowledege - good for a FAQ but if that was the criteria for a sticky, there would be pages of them !

And certainly data (etc) on a separate PHYSICAL drive (not just logical/partition). Drives themselves (not just Windows) have a spot of trouble accessing two separate partitions at the same time !

geoff

If you want to quickly determine how much time you'll save rendering to a separate physical drive from the source media as compared to rendering to the same drive try this experiment ... Find a file on a drive somewhere that's similar in size to what you expect your final render to be. Copy this file to another folder on the same drive and time how long it takes. Now copy this file to a different physical drive and time how long that takes. Subtract this time from the first time and note the difference. It may be a minute or even as short as a few seconds.

This is pretty much exactly how much time you'll save by rendering to a separate disk over rendering to the same disk: a few seconds or maybe a minute. Compare that to typical rendering times, sometimes several hours. What difference does a minute make? Not enough for me to care, especially since i have much better things to do with my life than hang around the rendering PC waiting for the exact moment when the render finishes! :)