NLE system: Seperate System Drive?

MH_Stevens wrote on 3/8/2005, 7:09 PM
I'm setting up my new editing system. The PC I got has two 200MG hard drives in a RAID 0 formation, so I just have one Partition (C:\). I have often read that the system should be on a seperate hard drive on it's own. I have other drives I could throw in so I'm asking is this advice of a real advantage? And if so where do you install the Vegas program. To the Root\:Program Files folder in the drive with Windows or do you install Vegas on to the second large storage drive?

Comments

John_Cline wrote on 3/8/2005, 7:23 PM
Yes, install one of your other drives for the system drive. (40 gig is more than enough.) Install the operating system and all programs to this drive, then use the 400 gig RAID-0 for data only. (i.e. captured video, audio, graphics.and Vegas .VEG files.)

John
oneTman wrote on 3/9/2005, 3:04 AM
I agree with John Cline, you need more than one drive. Use the smaller drive for your program files (and NOTHING else) and your larger drive for media file storage. I would even recommend a third drive for rendering your finalized temp files to (especially when using DVDA) I have tried (in the past) to store all files on one drive and experienced many problems with that kind of setup. Trying to render to the same drive that the source files are stored on can cause some serious errors. Partitioning the larger drive will work, but not as well as having two (or more) larger drives.
Scott
rmack350 wrote on 3/9/2005, 7:30 AM
I don't know about "NOTHING else". Depends partly on your tastes and partly on necessity. You have to keep your user directories on the boot partition as a place to keep program preference files and things like that. You may want to keep your user documents there as well, just to keep them away from your projects drive (the raid array). Personally, I have just the one system and about 60GB of non-project files.

It's a good practice to copy your smaller assets to a folder on a different drive at the end of the day. Just to back up your project files, vidcap files, and still image assets. The larger media should be recoverable from tape as long as you have the other files. Remember that a Raid0 array has at least twice the chance of failure as a single drive would.

And that raises the question of renders that can't be recovered from tape. Not sure what you'd want to do with them. Maybe render to a third disk, maybe just run RAID0+1 or (not so trivial) Raid 5? so that all your media is recoverable even if the a disk in the array fails?

Rob Mack
BillyBoy wrote on 3/9/2005, 7:40 AM
RAID setups don't seem practical to me for a video editing system except to use the raid controller as another drive channel. If backup and fear of loss of data is the big concern, I find either removable (non RAID) drives either in a drawer or the newer type like the larger 300 or 400 GB Seagate USB/Firewire that have BounceBack automatic backupsoftware support built at the push of a button is a more economical and effective setup.

Many newer motherboards have RAID support, so you can have a primary/secondary slave/master channel on each of those plus repeat it on the RAID controller channel giving you support for 8 devices, a combination of hard drives and DVD/CD burners all without adding any external card and all without the bother of setting up a RAID (array).
johnmeyer wrote on 3/9/2005, 8:33 AM
My approach is similar to what John and others recommended. Here are a few more details:

1. Get at least two physical disks. The ideal is to put them each on a separate controller. However, if this means having to put your DVD drive as a slave, then you are better putting both disks on one controller and the DVD/CD drives on another.

2. On the first physical disk, partition the disk into two partitions. On the first partition (C:), put your O/S and your programs, and nothing else. 40GBytes is MORE than enough. I have a huge number of apps installed, plus I have System Restore enabled, and I still have only used 6.8 Gbytes.

3. Use the second partition on your hard disk for your "My Documents" folder. You can download the "TweakUI" XP app from the Microsoft site and use this to move all your system folders to this second partition (which will be the D: drive).

4. Partition the second physical disk into one big disk drive (the E: drive). Put your video assets here. When rendering, you can speed things up by always sending the rendered video to a different physical drive (typically from E: to D:).

The advantages of this approach is that:

1. You can use a mirroring backup program (like Ghost) to backup your system files, without creating a backup set that is any larger than necessary. Imaging software is an all-or-nothing proposition, meaning that you have to backup EVERYTHING on the partition. Thus, the "trick" of putting nothing but your O/S and programs on this partition gives you the smallest possible restore set that can be used to get you up and running in less than an hour should your main hard disk get trashed.

2. You can do a backup of all your data files by backing up only the My Documents directory. Keep your media files out of this directory, but try to put EVERYTHING else in there. Again, it makes backing up a cinch.

3. Your media capture will go more smoothly by not having to "fight" for the bandwidth on the drive that holds the O/S and programs (although with modern computers, this advantage is probably no longer a big deal).
BillyBoy wrote on 3/9/2005, 9:10 AM
While of course backing up in important, critical even, how one does it is also important and methods vary depending on what you're backing up, how much (how many GB's) are involved, etc...

Years ago I too used various types of "ghosting" or disk imaging software that in effect take a snapshot of a partition that is suppose to be a byte for byte mirror image. In my opinion one VERY BAD aspect of this method is the "image" in most schemes is nothing but a huge single file of all your seperate files lumped together.

Sure, more advanced applications allow you to recover specific parts of this recovery file if disaster strikes. However, the real danger comes from the mirror image or the giant file itself gettting corrupted or in some way damaged. If that happens, then very likely ALL YOUR DATA from the point of corruption to the end of the file typically is lost and not recoverable.

In order words if you back up a partition that lets say is 20GB with some imaging software and the image file gets corrupted at the half way point in this file, half or 10GB of your precious files likely are lost or damaged, maybe parts throughout the entire 20GB A risk I rather not take.

While making seperate backups of indvidual files can be more a pain, the process can be easily automated. The lost risk if it happends is generally reduced to risking the lost of a A FILE, not a huge portion of some giant image file that contains all your data. Further, newer backup software regardless of brand quickly can compare what's on drive B and only back up what's changed on drive A making the process quick when only changing a handful of files.

Anyhow, not suggesting one method is better than another, it depends on your risk factors and other redudancy factors. I make three backups of everything imporant for my video files. A backup on a hard drive, another copy burned to a DVD and a third copy, just in case, on DV tape, that can be recoved from none computer methods using a camera or deck.
MH_Stevens wrote on 3/9/2005, 9:20 AM
I think I have Norton Ghost. Will this be the way to get my system on to the new blank C: drive? Or do I need backup my data and install windows and programs from scratch? My system has IDE and RAID controllers so I guess adding the drive part is easy-BIOS might even reccognise it. When the new C: is installed and my RAID set-up becomes D: can I just COPY the system and Program files across or is the registry lost this way?

Thanks All.
RichMacDonald wrote on 3/9/2005, 10:38 AM
Good comments by everyone, but keep in mind that much of the advice is workarounds for not having (or having limited) backup software. With good backup software, some of the constraints for where you put your OS, MyDocuments, and video data go away.

Personally I use a single RAID 0 for everything, with another IDE drive dedicated to backup. My backup software can recover the system at any time (and go back to any particular day in the past), and I can control which additional files/folders are backed up and which are not. I have one "setting" for automatic overnight backups to the IDE and another for weekly "system" backups to DVD for offsite storage. The only problem is that my backup IDE isn't large enough, so I have to live with a significant percentage of video clips which aren't backed up (but are recoverable in an emergency from the original tape),

I think a single drive is easier to manage than multiple drives & partitions. I've gone back to multiple drives and become so annoyed at having to move things around to ensure no single drive gets full that I said the heck with it and went back to a single drive. IMHO, good backup software beats multiple drives + partitioning for convenience.

Something to keep in mind is that RAID 0 for your OS and apps makes your computer much more responsive. The OS starts up much faster and each app starts up faster. Not a big deal if the computer is dedicated to video, but significant if the computers serves many mistresses and you do several things at once. Until RAID 0, I didn't realize how many apps have become disk IO constrained. Still, to make sure I'm not misunderstood, if you're doing primarily video, then a single IDE for the system and apps is fine.

This leaves the "one vs two drives" debate. In the "old days", you needed two drives because the OS could take over at the wrong moment and ruin your video capture or print to tape. Those days are gone. I find that one RAID 0 drive is easily fast enough. The second reason for two drives is that copying video files is slow on a single drive. This is still true for RAID 0 as well; its the only thing noticeably slow on my machine. To a lesser extent, renders could be slower (since you're reading and writing to the same drive), but I've never seen this quantified. My suspicion is that the CPU is normally the render bottleneck and not the drive. Also, if I render to a different drive I might turn right around and copy the rendered file back to the "main" drive, which negates the performance benefit. Still, easy to organize your work to take advantage of two drives.

I'm afraid I'm no Ghost expert so I cannot help there.

Final caveat on RAID 0: If you use the motherboard it will take a small percentage (less than 10% at worst case, I believe) of your CPU to run it. Also, because it is CPU-based, system crashes can (and therefore eventually will) corrupt the drive. I've had crashes which forced me to repair the drive (which is a PITA since you're doing it from Windows recovery CDs and its no guarantee it'll work) and twice I had to reinstall Windows. (The cause was actually bad RAM, btw, but plan for YMMNV :-) Next time I setup a computer I'm going with a dedicated RAID controller.