OT: Hard drive bandwidth, Vegas-Mac Pro/Boot Camp

vitalforce wrote on 4/9/2008, 12:18 AM
I have read that a SATA II hard drive speed when running Win XP via Boot Camp on a Mac Pro Quad, defaults to a 100 speed instead of potential 300, something about the drivers Boot Camp gives you. Heavy throughput of video with FX on the XP side versus the OSX side does seem to show a smoother and quicker video stream in OSX, implying more hard drive bandwidth.

Is this account true, and if so, has anyone explored how to get the drive speeds up?

Comments

rmack350 wrote on 4/9/2008, 8:47 AM
Not explored it and don't know if it's true but my understanding was that most single hard drives couldn't even swamp out the SATA150 data rate. The main point where that 150 vs 300 rate ought to make a difference is in filling up the drives cache.

There might be other issues involved, though. I'm not really familiar with boot camp. I'd assume it just loads XP and then gets out of the way, like Grub and LILO, but I understand that the Mac uses something more modern than a legacy BIOS, so there must be a bit of a difference. I think that part of what bootcamp needs to do is initiate a legacy BIOS, and that might be dropping the system into SATA150 mode. This is all speculation on my part, though.

Rob Mack
Seth wrote on 4/11/2008, 6:55 AM
I've found (with any boot configuration :) that system disk speed takes a back seat to storage disk speed as far as streamlining I/O. Even the fastest spinning desktop HDD's (WD Raptor) use SATA 150 as the standard. In other words, for your system drive bandwidth does not equal speed. Just use an external RAID for your media.
ritsmer wrote on 4/11/2008, 7:16 AM
One thing is numbers - another thing is real life :-)

Check John Clines rendertest-thread:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=526098&Replies=194

It has also some results from Vegas running on a Mac Pro - and they are pretty convincing.

I am about to order one very soon.
Cheno wrote on 4/11/2008, 8:28 AM
I'm not a computer guru and don't claim to be but from everyday use and having posted rendertest results back in Feb 07 when I bought my MacPro, it was running as fast or faster than comparible machines with same-ish specs.

Running like a champ and I'd beg to say you'll get positive feedback from every MacPro / Vegas user to the same regards. In fact I think Vegas on the Mac is snappier than FCP on the Mac. Can't say I agree with drive bandwidth not being 100% utilized.

LSHorwitz wrote on 4/11/2008, 11:17 AM
Just a cautionary note:

I have owned 2 recent MacPros, both 3.0 GHz dual proccesor machines, one a 4 core and the other an 8 core. I posted my Vegas results previously on the rendertest thread.

I disposed of both MacPro machines for the following reasons:

1.Both will only allow 2 GB of RAM to be seen in Bootcamp/Windows XP despite the machines having 5 GB installed.

2.Neither machine would support the use of hardware cards in the PCI Express slots in Bootcamp/Windows even though Mac OSX handled them properly, This includes a lot of very useful video editing cards which become unusable on the MacPros, such as the Blackmagic, AJA Kona, Matrox, etc. which Vegas supports properly on my Dell but not on the MacPros.

3. I had weird and random shutdowns in Bootcamp / Windows on both MacPros.

4. There is no backup solution on the market I am aware of for the Windows environment due to the non-standard disk partion scheme used by Apple along with a BIOS that does not permit the Master Boot Record of Windows-stye disks to be recognized.

5. Final Cut Pro Studio HD takes forever to render.

In all fairness, these 2 machines were owned before Leopard was introduced, and thus some or all of my objections may no longer apply.

I now use a Dell QX9650 Extreme machine, which blows away the 8-core Quad Xeon on Vegas rendering at a cost which is $1600 less ($2700 versus $4300) and runs much faster.

I have owned literally dozens of Macs going back to the first 512K Fat Mac and nearly every one since then, but video editing and rendering just goes much quicker on my Dell.....

Larry
vitalforce wrote on 4/17/2008, 1:40 PM
Ah well...Long as it works...