Thanx Byron. I actually have a raid setup on one machine and a single drive on the other for editing. I see no difference between them as far as editing. I thought this was a bit strange. Only diff is one machine has a ge force 560t. hmmm.

I'm having no issues whatsoever just using USB3 drives.

It really depends upon the demands of your video codec and how many tracks you have. If you edit native DSLR footage, you don't need a super amount of disc throughput. Just CPU power to decompress it. If you are using an intermediate like Cineform, you need a bit more throughput, but even a USB2 drive will handle two streams. The only time you need RAID is if you are working with uncompressed video.

I take this back. I do see a difference between machines after further workings. The nvidia 560t machine with one single sata seems to handle straight dslr footage much better than our machine with a radeon hd 4800 non gpu vid card and raid drives. Both machines identical as far as guts. Dell with i7 2.67.

Laurence. can you use a usb 3.0 drive on a computer that does not have a 3.0 usb plug? I see it says backward compatible with 2.0 but will you lose the speed I wonder?
Thanx

Remember that with Raid 0 your failure rate increases by 100% and you likely will lose all your data unless you have a backup system.

Ralph

.

" I see it says backward compatible with 2.0 but will you lose the speed I wonder?"

Yes, the USB3.0 drive will operate at USB 2.0 speeds, the limitation is the speed of the USB interface. USB 2.0 has a maximum speed of 480 megabits/second, USB 3.0 is over 10 times faster at up to 5 gigabits/sec. The real-world USB 2.0 hard drive transfer rate is up to around 30 megabytes/second. The limitation is the USB 2.0 interface, not the hard drive. Using USB 3.0, the limitation is the speed of the hard drive itself. I regularly get 100 megabytes/second using USB 3.0 with conventional hard drives. USB 3.0 should be easily capable of around 400 megabytes/second.

Others can bash RAID and say there is no benefit but they likely do not have a hardware RAID card or have some other bottleneck in their system...

In our main editing rig I use a 3Ware 9650SE hardware RAID card that has (4) 2TB drives operating in RAID0 and (8) 2TB drives operating in RAID10 for speed & redundancy. The source video is kept on the RAID0 because we keep a backup elsewhere. The final edited video & VEG files are saved to the RAID10. The 9650SE was chosen because it is very reliable even if it is not the fastest card available. Large files copy from one raid to the other at approx 400 Mbps.

In Vegas 10e my overclocked 980X with 24GB or RAM will operate at 100% during rendering. A two hour multi-cam HD project generally takes two hours to render. Clients often want more than one file type, so I often render (2-3) projects at once. If I try to do this from a single SATA drive it really bogs-down. Everything takes longer to render and I get the notorious render to black issue a lot more often since multiple versions of Vegas are asking a single hard drive for the same info....

All of my RAID drives are in (3) 5-across hot-swap trays that consume (9) 5.25" bays total. (12) HD slots hold the RAID drives and (3) function as external hot-swap bays. In (3) years I only had one incident where one of the RAID10 drives started sounding rather loud. I merely pulled it out & replaced it before I left for the night and the next day everything was working fine.

On the RAID0 I also keep a copy of all of my stock video and audio files. The search function is especially fast. For files I have never used before, Vegas builds the audio levels very, very fast compared to a single drive system.

If nothing else I like that I do not have to plug-in external USB 3.0 drives or eSATA drives or have to worry about bad connections or external power supplies.

Everything just works... well... except for V11...

I am using a pci-e silicon 3132-4port raid card which I will say made a huge difference when I was using hdv footage. But now since we are using dslr footage (mov) by nature it has been a bit different on performance. Rhino are you familiar with this low budge card? Thanx
David

The Silicon Image 3132 chip is from the 2006 era and was a common means to add SATA ports to motherboards and PCIe cards before Intel started integrating RAID into the southbridge (ICH10R, etc.). Although it may allow you to configure a RAID during startup it is really a software-based solution like most motherboard chips. We actually had a set of 3132 PCIe cards from earlier systems and they were much slower in all regards compared to the onboard ICH10R southbridge.

Good to know. Thanx Rhino.