Looks like a great system...one thing to consider for future, is that with 4 more drives on the SATA, you can have a really nice RAID for uncompressed...Not too much more $$ overall, and you'd be set for a BMD uncompressed card. One thing I can't stress enough...Shoot HDV and then capture as uncompressed via BMD, it REALLY smokes. Seriously great look, hard to discern from HDCAM unless you have really crappy lighting and fast motion combined.

RAM: 4X512MB DDR sticks should run a little less than $300?

Hard drives: You might want to look at the larger 7200rpm drives (instead of 10k/15k drives like the Raptor). The capacity:cost ratio is a much higher for 7200rpm drives.
More space means you waste less time deleting old stuff. This makes that setup "faster" in a way.

BMD capture cards: For HD, I believe you need a PCI-X slot? Do check that your motherboard has that.

Thanks for the replies folks -

fldave - I've heard lots of good things about onboard SATA raid, I'm sure hoping it's stable. I know some people are posting some screaming fast disk benchmarks with it.

DSE - how are you capturing HDV uncompressed? Your right on about the BMD card, I believe this motherboard is on their approved list - but only for standard def. I've got a local vendor here who will let me try a Decklink HD card in it to see if it works. I've also heard that you can capture uncompressed HD to a four drive Raptor raid 0 if you only let it get half full. Right now I think I'm going to stick with Cineform & fairly standard PC hardware & go to the BMD (and the 5 terrabyte $30,000 raid) later.

glennchan - my prices might be a bit off, I'm still checking things out :) As for the Raptors, I've used a bunch of them and they are fast and reliable. They also come with a five year warranty and with the luck I have with hard drives I could sure use it.

Z1 uncompressed output, using component cables, fed to the BMD card via the multibridge.
I didn't know that you could successfully capture to a 4 drive RAID, I'd be contacting Black Magic about that.

I forgot my 65" Sony HDTV, in the other room. Clunky to PTT and check some things out through the Firewire. It's a hobby right now, but it does look sweet.

I think for uncomp HD via BMD you'll need SCSI RAID.
You MIGHT get lucky with 10K rpm SATA RAID. I have little faith in on board RAID, lost a LOT of work to that kind of setup once, since using rocketRAID controller with no problems.
Multibridge uses a 1 x PCI-E slot, for PCI-X you need to spend more $$$ on the adaptor board.

Hey farse, thanks for the response. Yep, to go HD you pretty much need dual channel SCSI and lots of it... not in the cards for me right now.

Just curious, what kind of motherboard and controller were you using for onboard raid? Was it Parallel ATA drives?

Yeah,
parrallel ATA drives. Thing coughed on me twice and I gave that away as a bad joke. Both drives have since been running in the same machine for years now without a hiccup so it wasn't the drives.
New big machine is using SATA but I told the system integrator i wasn't interested in using the RAID capabilities of the mobo. THe RAID controller has 8 ports and wasn;t that expenensive. I'm still a little uncertain of just how much of the processing has been taken away off the CPUs by going down this path though.
As someone who used to work on minicomputer hardware design I'm very conscious of this aspect of system design. We'd build a SCSI controller that had all the bells and whistles, DMA and interrupt driven. Then the software engineers would screw with the thing, things like allocate a fixed block of RAM for the disk transfers and then have the CPU copy the data to where it was needed and the whole time polling the controller waiting for the transfer to complete.
Bob.

It is a great system, you cannot go wrong. But I dissagree on the drive selection. I think your raptors are too small for HDV projects. Once those drives get over 60% full, they begin to slow down perf wise.

I suggest you keep two raptors for your system drive, but go with four 250 - 300 gb drives for your media array. (Maxtor or the new Hitachi's are fine).

I loved my raptors, but moved them to my wife's machine. They are now two generations old. The newest generation 7200 rpm drives with 8 or 16 mb of cache actually outperform Raptors in nearly every benchmark these days. Raptors still rule for small file activities like office and system drive stuff, but the newer generation 7200 rpm drives will likely outperform for large HDV media. Search the web for benchmarks.

You also get much more disk space p/dollar with the 250 to 300 gb drives. If you work on HDV like me, you can easily use 500 GB of space with .m2t files and AVI and your test rendering.

Also, be sure to put your windows swap file on your media raid array. Vegas is so much faster when you move your windows swap file to a different drive than your system drive.

> Anyone have any suggestions or know that this stuff works/doesn't work? Thanks a bunch for your time!

Yoyodyne, I’ve been doing the exact same thing and also selected the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium and AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ for the mobo and proc to build my system around. Here are some general comments.

Picking the right RAM is always a challenge as things that should work together don’t always. With all due respect to Crucial (they do make good RAM) I’m going with CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model Twinx2048-3200c2 – Retail $295. That leaves two slots open to upgrade to 4GB later.

I am also trying to build as quiet a system as possible so I’m going to try the Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450Watt SmartPower 2.0 Retail $109.

Also in trying to keep it quiet and cool, I’m planning to add a 3rd party CPU cooler. The ZALMAN CNPS7700-ALCU 120mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan – (Model #: CNPS7700-ALCU) Retail $38.99. I’m not sure how good the AMD stock coolers are but with long renders I’m not taking any chances.

I also plan to use the WD740GD as my boot drive but go with higher capacity 72000PRM drivers in a RAID 0 for capture. Probably 2 of the the Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JS 250GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM $110 each. I have no plans for uncompressed capture so this should have plenty of throughput.

My only decision now is what graphics card to get. I have dual monitors now and I do some 3D work with Cinema 4D so I want something that has good 3D/OpenGL support. I’d also like something without a noisy fan but that’s probably only possible on low end cards. Decisions, decisions.

~jr

Cool - thanks a ton JohnnyRoy! This is exactly what I was looking for! I hear you on the ram thing, it can be tricky. I've had iffy luck with Corsair - it's good stuff and fast but I know Crucial has a compatibility list & I tend to just go with that. Does Corsair do something like that?

I would love to hear how your system performs when you get it together - good luck!

PeterRabby - thanks a ton. I know that four 75 gig drives (300 gigs total) is not a huge array but I can always shove a bunch of cheaper 7200 rpm drives in as well. As for Raptor benchmarks - Toms Hardware did a big article recently:

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/index.html

It looks like the old Raptor stomps everything else by a good margin & I really like that 5 year warranty :) Also here is a quote from the article;

"We believe that a new generation of Raptor drives will appear in the not-too-distant future." I know exactly when those drives will be released...right after I get my "old generation" Raptors from Newegg delivered to my house!

Thanks a bunch for the help folks!

> I know Crucial has a compatibility list & I tend to just go with that. Does Corsair do something like that?

Yup Corsair has a System Configurator on their site. I just used the motherboard model and it listed all the memory they had tested. I was surprised that ASUS didn’t have a compatibility list on their site (they use to).

Also lots of reviews at Newegg.com said they were using this memory with the ASUS 8N-SLI Premium without any problems. I tend to trust the reviews at newegg because they are from real people (some not so bright, but "real" non-the-less). ;-)

~jr

Oh sweet - I must check that out. Thanks so much for that info!

Thats actually the best thing about Newegg - those user ratings. Not only can they be incredibly informative but sometime hilarious, it's one of the main reasons I shop there.

Thanks again!

RAM: I have run my own tests and found that lower memory timings do nothing for rendering in Vegas. I have tried to approximate real-world results, and not benchmark results (many benchmarks have little to do with real world performance).

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18841

I would get normal RAM (i.e. corsair valueRAM; normal in the sense that it's not the low latency version), not low latency RAM like Corsair TwinX. Crucial, Mushkin, and a number of other manufacturers are well-regarded brands for normal RAM.

2- Hard drives:
A 5 year warranty doesn't mean that a drive will be more reliable. Probably the better thing to do is:
Make sure your drives are well cooled. Excessive heat is very bad for hard drives and will make them fail faster (happened to me). If you have air moving over the drives then they should be good.
You may be able to glean some information from the drive reliability database over at storagereview.com (registration req'd). Their sample size isn't that large (and may be biased, although they do try hard to avoid that) but it's the largest I've seen.

If you like 5 year warranties, Seagate now offers them on their drives (other manufacturers may also be doing that).

3- I believe for uncompressed HD the most important spec/benchmark is the sustained write rate. It's more or less what's happening.

The end transfer rate is also important because write speeds drop off as you get to the inside part of a hard drive platter. Lower sustained write means you can drop frames when the drive fills up too much.

4- SCSI versus SATA versus PATA:
Many of the large RAID systems (i.e. apple xserv RAID) use ATA hard drives (it uses 500GB drive modules, and there are no SCSI drives that big). By system I mean the whole shebang. The ATA drives connect to the RAID controller, and then the RAID system connects to the computer via some other interface (i.e. fibre channel, SCSI, firewire).

Certainly the RAID controller makes a difference on performance. There are various benchmarks out there showing the difference in performance between various RAID controllers (and between hardware and software RAID). Software RAID might actually give higher transfer rates (I believe it does for OS X).

I don't think you should necessarily write SATA RAID off. It could work (and if it does you may be saving lots of money). However, you definitely want to know if it does in fact work. There's a big gap between theory and practice (i.e. in theory, computer programs like Vegas don't have bugs; in practice, it does have bugs... probably less than other NLEs). The practical thing to do would be to figure out a working SATA RAID combination... either:
A- Try it yourself, and see if you can get a 100% refund without restocking fees if it doesn't pan out (may be unlikely you can get 100% refund).
B- Try to find other people with working SATA RAIDs.

5- In pratcie, it may be better to use cineform than uncompressed HD???
Cineform may be faster, as the hard drive will not bottleneck your render speeds. With uncompressed, you probably can't render faster than the hard drives for simple stuff that would otherwise render quickly.
Cost-wise, cineform is cheaper.
Quality-wise, cineform may look exactly the same as HD. (Or, you can't tell which looks better.)
*Haven't tried this myself.

Quality-wise, cineform may look exactly the same as HD.
It doesn't. There is a fair amount of greater richness in the uncompressed image.
Properly configured SATA RAIDS are fine, IF you've got the drives.
The guys at BMD's tech support are exceptionally willing to help. I dealt with their US rep in Las Vegas, and later with Simon and his tech team over the phone in Melbourne. Yes, it took 3-4 phone calls to get it all happening, but it was a good learning experience. Enough so that I'm building a new system using a HighPoint card. I've asked for a review unit of the new Addonis card, but I'm told by a few folks that this controller is problematic.

Hhhmmmmm.....I do love the greater richness. I like the way this is shaping up.

Thanks a bunch DSE - as always you are a fantastic resource.