I too tried the Promise Fast Track 66 with the identical WD 20 gig
hard drives (I also tried it with Maxtor Drives). Believe me, I spent
hours testing and reconfiguring. I didn't just have problems with
Vegas I had problems with all my sound software. Bench marks showed
that the RAID system was slower for sustained transfers than the
single drive (which matches your gapping experience). I got so
frustrated that I returned the Fasttrack and bought a Ultra3 SCSI and
a controller (although the ULTRA 2 SCSI is pretty much the same speed
for sustained transfers). This costs a lot more but it seems to be
very stable and I am happy with the setup. I am in no way an expert,
but I am just giving you my experience.

If you are wondering about IDE vs SCSI, the posts on other news
groups have stated that a 7200 RPM SCSI isn't much better than a
Ultra66 7200 RPM IDE. But a 10,000 RPM SCSI (especially with a large
catch) is faster. (I get a sustained tranfer rate of 9 megabytes/sec
with my WD 20 gig 7200 RPM Hard Drive with a 2mb buffer and 16 mb/s
with my new WD 18.3 gig 10,000 RPM SCSI3 Drive with a 8mb buffer).

Good luck,
Jeff

Walterius Till wrote:
>>Hello Karl.
>>when I configered my PC I also tried a raid-system similar to yours.
>>but every audioperformance did not work ok.
>>the SCSI-Raid worked out fine but it was too exensive,
>>so LVD drives are ok:
>>~30 tracks + 4 trackfx each
>>~ 5 busses + 1 or 2 plugin each
>>no problem with LVD drive
>>
>>single tracks without fx
>>50 are working well
>>
>>have a nice installation
>>Walterius
>>
>>Karl Caillouet wrote:
>>>>Well, we finally quit procrastinating and installed a
>>>>Promise FasTrak66 Raid controller in our DAW running Vegas
>>>>Pro under Win98.
>>>>
>>>>A single, 20GB, 7200 RPM, WD drive ... that was used
>>>>strictly for recording onto ... is what we have been using
>>>>for some months now. We added an identical 20 GB drive and
>>>>the Promise controller (w/ATA66 cabling) configured in a 2
>>>>drive, Raid 0 stripe array, tuned for A/V performance, and
>>>>to tell you the truth I am not impressed thus far.
>>>>
>>>>The DAW actually seems more prone to gapping in this
>>>>configuration than it did with the single drive. According
>>>>to Promise tech support everything appears to be installed
>>>>and working correctly.
>>>>
>>>>Since I just finished a two day, twenty hour mixing
>>>>marathon yesterday under the old configuration, I was real
>>>>tuned to the system's performance before the upgrade today
>>>>and just don't see where we gained that much, if any.
>>>>
>>>>I got the same comments from others after a few minutes
>>>>use. Been used to seeing the hard drive indicator
>>>>ocassionally flash to roughly 17% with 24 tracks playing
>>>>back, and now it seems to flash to about 25-27% with the
>>>>same .veg project?
>>>>
>>>>Anyone else have a similar experience with Vegas and a RAID
>>>>array? Maybe two drives is just not enough?
>>>>
>>>>I admit to being a newbie to Raid systems, so maybe I am
>>>>missing something important in the configuration.
>>>>
>>>>Thanks for your thoughts and input.
>>>>
>>>>KAC ...

Jeffrey,

Thanks for the input ... very interesting to say the least. I got a
chance to use the box last night again and it seems very solid with
Vegas Pro and our other audio software ... no problems in that regard
thus far.

I just don't see that we are getting the much vaunted throughput that
Promise advertises with this setup.

(We did try to use the FastTrak66 on a dual processor(Gigabyte
motherboard)with Win2000 and could never get the OS loaded despite
upgraded Bios' and many, many hours of work.)

SF tech support could offer no pearls of wisdom on this issue, either.

Appears that we'll just chalk this one up to experience. Although I
have no comparisons, I am going to try and benchmark the system
sometime this week and see what the numbers say so I have some idea
of what we are facing ... the end result may be that we have just
purchased some more storage drives.

Once again, thanks for confirming what we ran across.

KAC ...

Jeffrey Litzinger wrote:
>>I too tried the Promise Fast Track 66 with the identical WD 20 gig
>>hard drives (I also tried it with Maxtor Drives). Believe me, I
spent
>>hours testing and reconfiguring. I didn't just have problems with
>>Vegas I had problems with all my sound software. Bench marks
showed
>>that the RAID system was slower for sustained transfers than the
>>single drive (which matches your gapping experience

I have been using the FasTrack66 with much different results. I had
to tweak nothing to gain a better track count. Just installed it, and
formated (two partitions, one FAT32 and one NTFS for NT4.)

I am at a loss as to what could be the problem.

Q: Is Win98 indicating that the FastTrack is sharing an IRQ? This
should make no difference, but it could be a cause of this.

Peter


Karl Caillouet wrote:
>>Well, we finally quit procrastinating and installed a
>>Promise FasTrak66 Raid controller in our DAW running Vegas
>>Pro under Win98.
>>
>>A single, 20GB, 7200 RPM, WD drive ... that was used
>>strictly for recording onto ... is what we have been using
>>for some months now. We added an identical 20 GB drive and
>>the Promise controller (w/ATA66 cabling) configured in a 2
>>drive, Raid 0 stripe array, tuned for A/V performance, and
>>to tell you the truth I am not impressed thus far.
>>
>>The DAW actually seems more prone to gapping in this
>>configuration than it did with the single drive. According
>>to Promise tech support everything appears to be installed
>>and working correctly.
>>
>>Since I just finished a two day, twenty hour mixing
>>marathon yesterday under the old configuration, I was real
>>tuned to the system's performance before the upgrade today
>>and just don't see where we gained that much, if any.
>>
>>I got the same comments from others after a few minutes
>>use. Been used to seeing the hard drive indicator
>>ocassionally flash to roughly 17% with 24 tracks playing
>>back, and now it seems to flash to about 25-27% with the
>>same .veg project?
>>
>>Anyone else have a similar experience with Vegas and a RAID
>>array? Maybe two drives is just not enough?
>>
>>I admit to being a newbie to Raid systems, so maybe I am
>>missing something important in the configuration.
>>
>>Thanks for your thoughts and input.
>>
>>KAC ...

Only IRQ shared is #10 (SCSI adapter for CD-R shared with the video
card {Matrox DH G-400}) ... that arrangement has apparently been the
case since we installed the video card some months back ... which did
nothing but improve performance.

Sysmon shows no large CPU hits while running a Vegas project and
memory usage does not appear to be a problem.

WinBench99 said of the array:

Start Test: 45,000kb at 1000kb/sec disk transfer rate
End Test: 25,000kb at 1000kb/sec disk transfer rate

Not being up on benchmarks, and unless I am reading it wrong, that
looks pretty high to me??

We are trying some PB buffer tweaking, etc. to see if that helps.

KAC ...

Peter Haller wrote:
>>I have been using the FasTrack66 with much different results. I had
>>to tweak nothing to gain a better track count. Just installed it,
and
>>formated (two partitions, one FAT32 and one NTFS for NT4.)
>>
>>I am at a loss as to what could be the problem.
>>
>>Q: Is Win98 indicating that the FastTrack is sharing an IRQ? This
>>should make no difference, but it could be a cause of this.
...

No progress on this issue ... and no amount of tweaking seems to
help ... when VP starts gapping now the memory usage is apt to shoot
up to 70+ MB from a normal around 20 - 27.

Engineers working over the past weekend reported SEVERE gapping when
playing back projects in Vegas Pro that never gapped previously.

It is strange that WinBench99 shows a dramatic increase in throughput
to the RAId array drive(s), but Vegas Pro performance is DEGRADED
dramatically since installing this system??

Bye bye Fasttrak66 RAID controller! ...

Funny thing is ... we have the FastTrack66 on a network server
running NT 4 and it flies! ... go figure?

KAC ...

>>We are trying some PB buffer tweaking, etc. to see if that helps.

I remember seeing on storagereview.com that the fasttrack66 had
problems working with the newer maxtor drives. Is that what you're
usuing? You may want to check some of the information on the forums
there at storagereview.

Karl Caillouet wrote:
>>No progress on this issue ... and no amount of tweaking seems to
>>help ... when VP starts gapping now the memory usage is apt to
shoot
>>up to 70+ MB from a normal around 20 - 27.
>>
>>Engineers working over the past weekend reported SEVERE gapping
when
>>playing back projects in Vegas Pro that never gapped previously.
>>
>>It is strange that WinBench99 shows a dramatic increase in
throughput
>>to the RAId array drive(s), but Vegas Pro performance is DEGRADED
>>dramatically since installing this system??
>>
>>Bye bye Fasttrak66 RAID controller! ...
>>
>>Funny thing is ... we have the FastTrack66 on a network server
>>running NT 4 and it flies! ... go figure?
>>
>>KAC ...
>>
>>>>We are trying some PB buffer tweaking, etc. to see if that helps.
>>

Hi Vern,

Thanks for the info ... I had heard that also. We are using two
supposedly identical Western Digital, 7200RPM, 20GB drives.

KAC ...

Vern Cooper wrote:

>>I remember seeing on storagereview.com that the fasttrack66 had
>>problems working with the newer maxtor drives. Is that what you're
>>usuing? You may want to check some of the information on the forums
>>there at storagereview.

While I wouldn't have predicted this. I can't say I'm really that
surprised in retrospect. Raid 0 usually delivers higher sustained
data rates for a single stream, but at the cost of INCREASING seek
times. (You have to wait for both drives to seek).

Where the Promise controller really shines is when you have a single,
very high data rate stream. Like video capture, for instance.

Since Vegas Pro will never need to read more than about 350Kb/Sec on
any one stream. Having the higher read speed here is mostly wasted.
While if you have more tracks, you ARE doing more seeks.

I suspect you would see an improvement if you had both drives on the
single machine NOT in a raid, but you had your source material
scattered over both drives. Then again, since IDE doesn't really
have an async read like SCSI does, you might not see any improvement
here either.

We have tested the case of two SCSI drives not in a raid and see
a dramatic improvement in track count when we take care to spread the
load over the two drives. That's a bit of a pain to do in practice,
so I'm not really suggesting that as a solution.

IDE has come a long way in the past few years. But SCSI still beats
it hands down for applications like Vegas where you are reading from
multiple streams AND doing work on the audio.

On a personal note. I've been a big fan of Trout Fishing ever since
I saw them down at the Kerrville Folk Festival about 10 years ago.
I'm pleased and flattered to have you using our software. Have you
used it to master any Trout albums?

tj

Karl Caillouet wrote:
>>No progress on this issue ... and no amount of tweaking seems to
>>help ... when VP starts gapping now the memory usage is apt to
shoot
>>up to 70+ MB from a normal around 20 - 27.
>>
>>Engineers working over the past weekend reported SEVERE gapping
when
>>playing back projects in Vegas Pro that never gapped previously.
>>
>>It is strange that WinBench99 shows a dramatic increase in
throughput
>>to the RAId array drive(s), but Vegas Pro performance is DEGRADED
>>dramatically since installing this system??
>>
>>Bye bye Fasttrak66 RAID controller! ...
>>
>>Funny thing is ... we have the FastTrack66 on a network server
>>running NT 4 and it flies! ... go figure?
>>
>>KAC ...
>>
>>>>We are trying some PB buffer tweaking, etc. to see if that helps.
>>