me:
C 80Gb system / applications
S 120 GB internal storage
T 200 GB internal storage
V 80 GB external firewire
X 120 GB external firewire
Z 120 GB external firewire

I use an 80GB system/application drive, with one 120GB internal and two 250GB firewires for all multimedia & DV. I organize the work so that a drive never has to write to itself, e.g., capturing to one drive and rendering to a different one, both being separate from the C: drive.

I, too, am a fervent proponent of rendering to a different physical drive than the one that contains the source material. This requires a minimum of three drives, a system drive for the OS and program files, one for the source material and one for the finished files. If your project truly needs to be rendered, that is color correction or other filters, titles or anything else that will make Vegas actually render every frame, then it won't make make much of a speed difference at all. But, for those long-form projects which are primarily cuts-only where Vegas can perform "smart rendering" (ie: just copying chunks of unmodified footage) then the final render will go much faster if it is reading from one drive and writing to another. In addition to saving time, it also saves a fair amount of wear and tear on the hard drive since the heads on the single drive won't be hopping all over the place.

That said, there are situations where I keep all of a client's project files on a Firewire drive, in that case I do tend to do everything on that one drive so I can keep everything in one place. These projects tend to be much shorter and don't take long to render either way.

John

I also believe in never writing to a drive that is being read from. Mainly because I could never get it to work properly if I tried it. It works wonderfully with 3 or more physical drives.

Some people seem to have problems with firewire drives, but others don't. I use removable (slide in) drives. The machine can't tell them from a standard bolted down drive. I have a shelf full of them and swap as needed.

I learned from Spot and others like him. I keep entire projects on one drive. When not working on that drive, I may switch to another one which has another complete project on that drive.

When I'm feeling rich, I may have all original media, etc. on one drive, and all rendered media on another, and store both together. Otherwise, I just store the original media, .veg, etc. on one disk since it can always regenerate the rendered media, again, when needed.

Thanks for the input all,
Yeah thats kinda what I've done:
C: drive OS and program files
V: drive source material and veg's etc..
Z: drive prerenders, final renders and I also set up a folder for Neon to place the "back up veg" to.
BTW ,John I did notice a speed up in renders (cuts only) by doing this, I wasnt expecting to decrease my render times , just to reduce the wear on the disc's and better organize my files.

There is one other issue that has been mentioned many times in this forum but bears repeating. Reading from one drive on a given IDE channel (say the master) and writing to another drive on the same IDE channel (say the slave), is just as slow as reading from, and writing to, a single drive.

The best setup for simultaneous read/writes is to have all working drives on seperate IDE or SATA channels or USB or Firewire ports. By working drives, I mean drives that the application will read from or write to.

Jan

Ditto all of the above. I use the removable bays and have only had 1 problem. Started dropping frames, acting slow, etc. Exchanged it, (it was defective)everything fine.

great tips Spot + others re multiple drives.... I had just gotten one external one, now I'll add another drive for media... so a C:/system d:/media e:/render drive

ken

The great thing about Vegas is that IF there actually is a difference between string on the "C" drive or storing on a video drive; you really can't tell.

There may be a difference, but today's quality of computer is so much greater these days, it hardly matters where files are parked.

I run a public access station that processes around 2,000 hours of video per year to mpeg-2. Each computer has 3 hard drives and when the 2 dedicated drives run out of space, we do not hesitate to capture and process to the "C" drive.

All you have to do is ask the laptop crowd who regularly break the "C" drive rule and park their video files there. I do it all the time on my personal laptop of a whopping 1.2 gig...

We're looking to move our PEG station to Vegas 5.
-Should the separate media & render drives be the same size?

Brk, FWIW, they do need to be the same size, that I know. As a matter of fact ,I've move my media to my new larger 200 gig drive and am using the old 160 gig drive for my renders. You figure that your media drive will most always more/and larger files. IE your source footage for the project, your stock footage(both DV AVI's)
and music files etc.
The render drive has prerender's (which I clean up/delete often)
then what I call prefinal renders(again something that I will delete after a project)
then your final renders, which for me are usaully gonna be mpeg2's and ac3's with the ocasional uncompressed avi's
But seeing as most of what stays on that drive is more compressed and all the "fat is cut out" I find that the smaller drive works fine for that.
Hope that helps

Jan,
>The best setup for simultaneous read/writes is to have all working drives on seperate IDE or SATA channels or USB or Firewire ports. By working drives, I mean drives that the application will read from or write to. <
So I assume for my set up I'm doing it right?
internal drive C: system ,programs etc.
internal drive V (same ide cable) : video files etc.
External USB 2.0 drive Z: render, prerender drive

We are a PEG as well. 2 Video servers, so our output is primarily mpeg-2. For the most part we are able to capture/process about 1,500 hours of video to mpeg-2 (annually) on 3 computers.

There are times that we run out of space/time. We have never been dissapointed with dumping stuff on the "C" Drive (a no-no in the old days) and then processing to mpeg-2.

We tape Gov't meetings and our record is 4hours and 38 minutes in one shot.

Vegas delt with it just fine and on the first try. Vegas is the most reliable and least time consuming on the operator.

We are now capturing directly to laptops utilizing Vegas capture - encoding to mpeg-2 then firewire or networking to our servers. For people who bring tapes you can mpeg-2 in realtime right in to our video server while the server is cablecasting.

For those who are interested, contact me directly.
stephen at mvweb dot com

Connecting your "C" drive (with applications) and your "V" drive (with video files) is not an optimal setup. The PCI bus can only communicate with one drive at a time on the same IDE channel.

Assuming that you have a DVD burner as master on your second IDE channel, the optimal setup would be to have two IDE controllers. If you don't have two IDE controllers integrated on the motherboard, then a PCI controller card will do just fine. Leave the "C" drive connected as is and connect your "V" drive as master on one channel of the second IDE controller.

Now, having said all that, I don't really know how much efficiency is gained by going to the optimal setup. Personally, I admit to being a bit obsessive about these things. I just purchased a Gigabyte 8KNXP motherboard which includes two IDE controllers and two SATA controllers - just to assure that I would never have working drives on the same IDE channel.

Jan