Comments

blink3times wrote on 10/31/2007, 6:29 AM
Rendering to the same drive (c drive) is not really a mortal sin. You won't get arrested/booked/convicted, and your machine will not self destruct and leave you in a near-death ball on the floor after it explodes. It works fine. It's just faster and more effective to render to a separate physical drive. I myself don't render to a different drive.... merely a different partition within the same drive.
winrockpost wrote on 10/31/2007, 6:38 AM
thanks blink,,,
good ,dont have time for jail right now,, more worried about explosions, and crashes
other than file organization ,are there other advantages for partitioning the drive ?
UlfLaursen wrote on 10/31/2007, 7:27 AM
I would say no, Winrock.

The drive is best placed on another channel, like all SATA HDD's are. Two drives og one PATA cable (40 pin wide, old one) and one channel is also not the best solution.

/Ulf
Maverick wrote on 10/31/2007, 12:40 PM
I myself don't render to a different drive.... merely a different partition within the same drive

I'm never too sure about any benefits of rendering to another partition on the same phsyical disc.

My understanding is that rendering to a completely different disc means that the discs can read write faster as one disc is reading while the other is writing. This cannot be happening with a partitioned disc, can it?

Cheers
dogwalker wrote on 10/31/2007, 1:47 PM
What about this situation? I have two SATA drives, and my source videos are currently on the D drive. So, I render back to the C drive, since it's different from my source drive. I see people say "don't render to the same drive where Vegas is installed" but I don't understand why yet.

I have a couple of options, just curious what you think:
(1) I could move my videos to my NAS drive (ethernet), but is the bandwidth of pulling video from a network drive really fast enough?
(2) I could move my source videos to my C drive and render to my D drive
Chienworks wrote on 10/31/2007, 2:55 PM
Primary recommendation: don't worry about it. It really makes very very little difference.

No one has ever said not to render to the drive where Vegas is installed. This doesn't matter at all. Where Vegas is installed affects the drive transfer rates so little as to be immaterial. The recommendation was not to use the system drive for storing source or rendered videos as there is a lot of activity to that drive all the time. The fact that Vegas is usually installed on the system drive is inconsequential.

Rendering to the same drive where the source videos are stored will incur a slight time penalty because the same drive must be read and written too alternately while rendering. So ideally one should have three drives. One for the operating system, one for source videos, and one for rendered videos. This will give you maximum rendering throughput. Using two separate partitions of the same drive is of no benefit as it will still be the same physical drive that has to be read from and written too.

Now, from a practical stand point, what does all this mean? Just about nothing. Yes, rendering to the same drive as the source will run a bit slower. How much slower? Well, here's how you find out. Find a file about the size of your finished render and make a copy of it on the same drive, timing how long it takes. Now, copy it to another drive and time how long it takes. The first copy should take a little longer than the second. This difference is how much longer it will take to render to the same drive as compared to rendering to a separate drive. What difference did you get? For me, it was a few seconds. What's a few seconds one way or the other when rendering takes minutes or hours? *shrug* Not worth worrying about!

You can judge rendering performance over a network drive the same way too. The difference there is usually noticeably longer, but still in the seconds range and probably not even going to be a full minute. Generally the rendering process doesn't even come close to tapping the speed of the drives or the network, so it's the processor speed that matters much more than the drive speed. The only case in which using a network drive would be a noticeable hinderance is if you use it for your source files and you have lots of tracks with lots of clips being accessed simulaneously on the timeline. The network connection will only run just so fast, so if the render process is trying to pull frames from a lot of different clips all at once it may slow down a little.

So, yeah, just go render. Don't sweat it.