>RAID and NLE don't always play nice together. Sometimes it actually slows down
>Vegas and causes errors. This has not been as much a problem with newer
> SATA hardware.
IMHO, you shouldn't unpack RAID hardware and expect it to perform (not talking about on-board RAID controllers here, lots of them are junk) you have to fine tune it for the intended workload until you to squeeze all the performance it can give you. (RAID level, file system block size, cache/write strategy and the list goes on...)
From my experience, default setting are EVIL or at best not optimal. Keywords: test , tune, test and re-tune. This can takes a lot of time ...

> I think you should be thinking in terms of raw CPU horsepower, rather than disc
> throughput or RAM. That's where you'll get your gains.
I'm working on that too and trying to reach the best bang for the buck specs.
I want to have everything right (try to) before committing money, it will take a few months before I start ordering the hardware, I always take my time to think about all requirements.

On a side note, it's too bad Vegas only runs under Windows I'd have liked to avoid paying for the license fee and put beefier hardware in the project. I like heavy metal ;-)

Thanks for your reply!

Maxx,

Your instincts are correct. Don't worry too much about the disk subsystem. Assuming you have a decent system most modern disk drives are more than fast enough HD video.

Spend money on CPU. The more cycles the better for any NLE.

Thanks for affirming my unscientific impressions.

If we are talking theoretical throughput here, a drive capable of 20MBs read / write is more than capable of handling the demands of HD.
Any EIDE system can handle that.

I still don't think reading from and writing to the same drive is the best practice, but agree that the CPU is the bottleneck 99% of the time, not the storage subsystem.

Another storage option is to get an external RAID with eSATA or FiberChannel interfaces like the ones from G-Technologies. Any of the G-Speed models have pretty high rated throughputs. If you are wanting to work with uncompressed video or the new capability of 4K resolution in Vegas Pro 9 you might want something with that kind of speed. Along with a fast CPU.

It seems to me that you get more from Vegas by having multiple fast drives, where you allocate one for your raw material, render to a second and have the temp files on a third fast drive. That at least allowed my PC to hit hear 90% on all 4 cores, where as it was dragging it's feet at around 50 when all was on 1 HDD.

The Temporary files folder is set under Options->Preferences in the General tab.
Also the Pre rendered files folder can be on a different drive then your other media, this is set in the project properties panel.

A.Grandt wrote: where you allocate one for your raw material, render to a second and have the temp files on a third fast drive
Amen to that - but do not forget to have the Windows pagefile on its own logical drive also.
Windows seems not to like writing and reading to the same drive at the same time.

BUT: even more significant is the operating system - When rendering with Vegas 8.0c under Windows XP x32 I had about 50 thousand Windows page faults per second - Now I run 8.0c under Windows 7 x64 on the very same machine and have some 0 to 2 page faults per second.
This makes the rendertime go down by 75 percent for my media - and I now render 25 minutes m2t 720p in about 11 minutes.
Quite surprising, btw, the first time I saw a rendering in the preview window at more than double playing speed :-)))

Raid over high speed drives for sure - Hardware raid will keep the load off your processor - I use a 3ware 9650SE for my OS - RAID 10 also write to drive. Data is fed off the ICH10R in RAID5 - (reading isn't processor intensive like writing is)- That said, I've tried multiple set ups (using combinations of 9 drives and haven't noticed much difference in performance one way vs another - Processor speed is King in video rendering - depending on what you are working with - When ever you are reading or writing huge files like uncompressed AVI drives start being the constraint more an more once you have adquate processor. Get a quad over 3 Ghz either stock or overclocking - faster is faster. An i7 is the best route. You don't need more than 6GB of RAM in my opinion really with an i7, 8 is fine with a pre-i7 quad. .

If CPU speed is most important to you, I guess you could go with two of the new i7 equivalent Xeon W5580 processors on an ASUS Z8PE-D18 motherboard and load up anywhere from 18 to 144GB of RAM.

And while you are at it drop in a 300GB Western Digital 10K rpm VelociRaptor for the boot drive and about 5 1TB RE3 drives in a RAID 5 setup.

Whew. I can only imagine what that might do with Vegas. Only imagine because I sure can't afford it.

I put together my dream system here.
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=13098167

CPU and RAM is king, that is true, however the king is useless without data, so being able to read data fast, as well as getting the data back to the hard disks is also important.

Sounds perfectly right -for test I just made a render with the disk monitor on - and I only have 3 off-the-shelf normal 7200 rpm SATA-II disks.

During render the disk utilization was just from 1 to max 10-20 percent - even if they had to feed the 2 quad Xeons (8 cpu cores) - so it seems, that disk speed is not a bottleneck and that it is better to bet the money on RAM, CPUs and some x64 bit windows 7 and programs.