I don't know that I completely agree with Gary's statement. The only time a drive will get any hotter than just sitting there and spinning is when there is a lot of head movement due to disk access. A lengthy defragmenting session probably heats the drive up more than any other operation. "Rendering" (which is actually just copying) unmodified footage when your source files and the rendered file reside on the same drive, involves a lot of head movement as well. As long as there is enough air flow for cooling the drive, it shouldn't be a problem. Sealed Firewire enclosures without active fan cooling can absolutely destroy a drive because of heat.

As far as some of the reported Vegas v6 problems, a overheating drive could be responsible, but during an Vegas full-up render, the CPU is maxed out and generating maximum heat, particularly in v6 due to the new HT optimizations. If your CPU heat sink is full of dust, the CPU can (and will) overheat and all kids of strange things can happen that get blamed on Vegas but are actually hardware related. All it takes is one CPU hiccup and Vegas goes down. Get a can of compressed air and blow out your computer regularly and make sure that there is enough air flowing through your computer case, especially around your drives.

John

Relating an experience that is mostly related ...

I have two 5.25" optical drives and four 3.5" hard drives in my tower. Since it's a standard sized case instead of an extra tall, they're all packed in pretty tightly. Two of the drives are 160GB and 180GB Western digitals which store all my video files and during a long render they can get too hot to touch. I had had several incidents in which the drives shut down and the render crashed.

I decided they needed more air, so i removed the plastic 5.25" panel covers in front of them. This actually made the situation worse as the air flow was now "unfocused". There was too much open space so the air flow coming in that large opening wasn't fast enough to carry away the heat. I put one of the plastic covers back in, covering the middle of the opening (it would only fit if i put it in inside out, and yes it does look strange) so that there are now two narrow slots just above and below those drives. Air now pours in nicely and keeps them quite cool.

I should probably mount another fan near the drives to force air across them directly. For now though, this solution is working well. It's not just the amount of air that matters, but that the air flows in the right spots.

or you can mount a hard drive fan to the drive itself, find them at compUSA for about $8.

I have one on my C drive blowing against the circuitboard side, and my three video drives have one 80mm fan in front to blow hot air past.

You're talking about airflow velocity. The air passing over the hot component needs to carry away heat faster than it's generated.

As far as bug reports go, it's kind of a witch hunt right now. I see an awful lot of people reporting that something has gone wrong and it must be a Vegas bug. Sometimes it's pretty obvious that it's operator error, a misguided expectation, or caused by other software, or hardware trouble. Many reporters aren't even searching this forum before posting their "bug report".

I'm waiting to see something like "My butt hurts. Must be a Vegas bug!"

Rob Mack

I doubt very much that rendering is going to stress a drive. In fact, the LONGER the render, the less stress on the drive. Think about it. Why do some renders take a long time? No, it is not because more data must be read into the computer: That is a function of the length of the video. Instead, the long render is required because of all the crunching the CPU must do. Since I'm sure your computer has plenty of RAM, it can store several frames of video in RAM. As each new frame is created during the render, there will be no disk activity until that frame is finished and the next frame must be created. Thus, if you have a ten minute video that takes eight hours to render, only a few minutes of that time is the disk actually going to have to read or write anything.

Being an engineer, I wanted to verify my theory before I posted this. I created a test project and did a 3D parent/child composite on some DV video. The render goes at about 1 frame/second. I'm looking at my disk drive light, and it dark almost all the time, only flashing, briefly, every 2-3 seconds.

By contrast, a cuts-only project is almost nothing but disk reads and writes.

Thus, short renders (or should I say, non-CPU-intensive renders) are the ones that stress the disk drive.

Finally, as already pointed out, the drive is spinning whether you are rendering or not (unless the computer goes into standby). The only extra energy required when reading is to drive the head, and this is done with a voice-coil mechanism that consumes very little energy. Most of the energy consumption (and hence the heat generation) is from that motor that keeps that disk spinning at a rather incredible seven thousand two hundred times every minute (seem more impressive than just typing 7,200 rpm).