OT: Hard drives for editing

Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/9/2008, 8:24 AM
Am looking to upgrade the IDE hard drives in my workstation to SATA - I'm looking for recommendations on best way to go for editing HDV with Vegas Pro 8.

Seems to be the consensus that Seagate Barracudas are the overall favorite here on the forums.

My current HD config is as follows:

First drive - 160GB Seagate Barracuda IDE paritioned 3 ways - C: 25GB OS only, D: 15GB Apps only, E: rest devoted to My Documents (mp3's, emails, etc)

Second Drive - F: 200GB Seagate Barracuda IDE - holds all audio project files and loops and is also the pagefile drive (4092MB pagefile)

Third drive - G: 2x160GB Seagate Barracuda Drives as raid0 on PCI IDE Raid card.

I'm thinking I would take these IDE drives and use them for backup of projects since I can attach an IDE to usb plug adapter to backup files.

On Videoguys DIY6 page, they spec'd a 250GB drive for primary and a 2x250GB raid0 for editing - but spec'd WD drives.

Questions I have - is Raid really necessary for editing HDV content? As you get to larger capacity hard drives (750mb - 1TB), is there any proof of higher failure rates? Would using a single large capacity drive be better than a Raid0 or even Raid 5 for either reliability or increase in speed while editing in Vegas Pro?

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 7/9/2008, 9:05 AM
WD's new 2-platter 640GB drive (WD6400AKS, abt $89 ea.) clocks around 100MB/s (megabytes/s, not megabits/s) read and write performance consistently, with large blocks even.

That means that for HDV you'll be limited by your CPU, not your hard disk, and that's without needing RAID.

Reliability is best achieved with fewer platters. I would not buy a 1TB drive today with more than 3 platters, and there are choices in this.

I challenge you to find a single negative review on this drive, and I certainly love mine.

Hardware RAID is [can be] good, software RAID is saddled with a lot of issues (it can be a challenge to try to get near the same performance as with a $500 RAID card).

Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/9/2008, 9:25 AM
So I could get away with a single 640GB drive for the video drive and then replace my other IDE drives accordingly?

I'm a little confused on what I have read - the AAKS designation has been applied to other drives in WD's line - does that mean they also have reduced number of platters? Does that mean that the WD 320GB AAKS drive has only one platter - thus improving performance as well??? It doesn't seem to have a 5 egg rating on NewEgg like the 640 AAKS does.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com
Coursedesign wrote on 7/9/2008, 9:34 AM
It appears that way, because the 320GB AAKS is single platter.

Single platter helps transfer rate: because of higher data density the bits are coming off the platter more quickly at the same rpm.

The only slight pain is in the increased seek time from the head having to position itself more precisely than before. I'd expect that difference to diminish towards 0 eventually.

Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/9/2008, 8:19 PM
SO what's the deal then with machines spec'd like the Videoguys DIY series using a Raid0 for video editing with a single drive can handle the throughput?

I'm confused on this issue - I was under the impression from everything I've read that having a raid0 improved performance - is that still the case?

Also - what about laptop editing? My only option for my Dell D620 is to use a PCMCIA Adaptec firewire card to capture with. I bought a drive caddy to put a second 250GB drive in since I rarely use the DVD drive/burner - am I better off putting that drive on an external firewire enclosure to capture/edit with?

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com
farss wrote on 7/9/2008, 8:59 PM
There's so many variables it's really hard to give a single definative answer. In general for video the best metric is Sustained Transfer Rate and the lowest CPU load, that's where hardware RAID controllers bear fruit. If you're working with multiple tracks or adding in tracks of audio then seek time also starts to impact as well.
What determines how fast you can read data from a disk is arial density the tighter the bits are packed the less time it takes for the heads to be where the data you're asking for is. So a drive with 2 platters will perform better than a drive with one identical platter.

All in all though many of these gains are tiny to irrelevant for our kind of needs. I just look at my CPU utilsation. If the CPU(s) aren't maxed out when I'm rendering then it's a fair bet faster disks would help, if they're over 80% then spending more money on faster disks isn't going to help much. For example on my dual Xeon system HDV can easily max out the cores, 10bit YUV has them loafing along. Add FXs and things change. Plus reliability is damn important, shaving 10% of your render times mean nothing if your disk system isn't reliable.

Bob.
Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/10/2008, 6:49 AM
Bob - I typically have no more than 2-3 video tracks with associated audio, along with maybe a video track for titles and 1-2 separate music/audio narration tracks if needed.

I've noticed that when I render out to h.264, AVI, etc, both cores of my CPU are pegged to 99%, although when previewing on the timeline, I still don't get real time preview even when I am set to Preview 1/4 size.

Just trying to nail down if the IDE hard drives I have in my desktop are the bottle neck, and whether using a separate raid card on an open PCI-x slot will improve performance - besides, these drives are 2 years old now and a little voice in the back of my head is beginning to tell me that I should swap them out for new drives, but it seems that users on NewEgg have found the larger the drive, the higher percentage of DOA or short lived usability before returning.

I've been all Seagate Barracuda IDE drives and I'm looking to finally make the switch to SATA, which I understand will improve performance due to the faster transfer rates - am I correct in that assessment?

I just don't want to make a purchasing decision that I will later regret.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com
farss wrote on 7/10/2008, 7:01 AM
If your CPUs are pegged at 99% then your CPU is the bottleneck, faster disks will not help much at all.
The HD is this machine is 10 years old however I do prefer the SATA interface, the smaller cables make it easier to wrangle cables inside the PC case.
I'm not a great fan of monster sized disks, if one goes belly up you loose more. I use mostly 200 or 250GB, more than enough for a couple of jobs worth of files. Any more on the one disk and it becomes harder to manage with several machines and swapping drives around. That could change if I can justify the cost of having some monster SAN box that holds everything.

Bob.
Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/10/2008, 7:29 AM
So if the CPU is pegged, than I need to look at a faster dual core or quad core? I thought the CPU being pegged was a good thing - or is it due to the speed at which it is capable of working is slowing things down - is that what you're saying?

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com

farss wrote on 7/10/2008, 8:08 AM
Something always must limit how fast the system can go, that's a fact of life when you're rendering. When your're just previewing if you can maintain the fps at the desired res then you don't need anymore speed from anything.

So yes, in your specific case more CPU speed is what you need.

In general highly compressed video formats will hit the CPU limit.
Less compressed will hit the disk limit.

Bob.
Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/10/2008, 9:02 AM
Since I'm on an AMD desktop - and looking at what my motherboard currently supports - I'm considering one of two AMD processors that show as being supported on Gigabyte's website.

The Phenom 8650 Toliman 2.3GHz processor tops out at 2.3Ghz using 95w or going with the Athlon 64 X2 5800+ Brisbane Dual Core 3.0Ghz using 89w.

Given those constraints, would using a higher clocked dual core be a better solution over the lower clocked Tricore? My motherboard doesn't support the Quad cores at this time so I'm left with these two options.

Cliff Etzel - Solo Video Journalist
bluprojekt | SoloVJ.com
Cliff Etzel wrote on 7/10/2008, 4:55 PM
~bump~