PC setup for optimal performance ?

uncle-buck wrote on 3/5/2009, 6:52 AM
What's the best way to set up my PC for optimal video editing performance with Vegas Movie Studio? On which drive should raw video files be stored, and to which drive should rendered movies be saved?

My current PC is running Windows XP Pro with a Quad core Q6600 processor, four hard drives running as the C drive under RAID 10 (striping and mirroring), and a single hard drive as my D drive. The Movie Studio program is installed on the C drive, raw video files are stored on the D drive, and movies are rendered to the C drive.

Most of the raw video files are in AVCHD and get rendered to regular DVD.

Thanks for any advice on improving this setup.

Comments

ritsmer wrote on 3/5/2009, 9:15 AM
To my opinion XP is most efficient when not mixing reading and writing from/to the same logical drive.
Probably it does not like reading and writing at the same time through the same buffer in RAM.

So one has to splitup the drives into at least logical drives with:
- mostly read ( raw material)
- mostly write (render to)
- mixed (programs, XP, pagefile)

After some experiments I have found the best setup for my configuration (2x quad Xeon, 3 phys drives split to 7 logical) to be:

-XP and programs on C:
-Windows Pagefile on another physical drives first logical and
-Render to on same physical drive but a second logical
-Raw video on the third physical
-Vegas temporary files on same physical drive as C: but another logical.