would 3 hard disks help performance

kraz wrote on 11/17/2006, 3:40 AM
Getting ready to buy a new PC mainly for editing .. so besides - the memory CPU etc. I read a lot about the windows swap file - and where it should be (NOT with the Vegas temp file) and was wondering - would it pay to have a dedicated drive ( can even be small -20Gb or so) - JUST for the windows swap file.
Would that give a boost?

also in terms of drives - so I have 4 things I am playing with on a Render
1. The source files
2. The destination file
3. The Vegas Temp/swap
4. Windows Sawp

I always try to have source and destination on diff drives - but givne I only have 2 drives (ignoring above) - which files should be with which temps/swaps?

Thanks
Allen

Comments

american afakot wrote on 11/17/2006, 4:07 AM
It is very helpfull to install 4 hard drives raid to o to minimize stutering during plaback
DavidSinger wrote on 11/17/2006, 7:59 AM
It is just as important to have different drive "clusters" (single drive, groups, raids, whatever) on different controllers. It somewhat defeats the purpose to have C: and a Raid0 D: on the same controller. Think of a controller as a pipeline. As the op system is thrashing though getting to drive C: your data is waiting in line for access to drive D: on a single-controller one-lane pipeline.

Most computers come with an ATA controller and a SATA controller. Put your C: drive on the ATA controller, your raid D: drive on the SATA controller. Take advantage of the two lanes.
richard-courtney wrote on 11/17/2006, 10:02 AM
The most memory you can / can't afford will help you the most.

Yes, I have Raid 5 on a PCI controller in my case 3Com with 4 drives.

I am looking for a new graphics card only for 3D animations with Caligari Truespace.

The other thing is this computer has bare lan support. No internet explorer and other
non editing/graphics software removed.
bigrock wrote on 11/17/2006, 10:43 PM
You said "Yes, I have Raid 5 on a PCI controller in my case 3Com with 4 drives."

Well that pretty guarantees you will have the worst performance possible. Raid 5 even with a seperate controller is bad enough but you are running on the PCI bus which is so bandwidth congested already you are really asking for trouble. Best to use SATA drives on the local bus ports of the chipset.

BigRockies.com Your Home in the Rockies!
Chienworks wrote on 11/18/2006, 4:01 AM
Getting a small, 20GB or so, would mean getting an older drive. It's interface would be slower than the other, larger drives in your system. Swap access might actually slow down if you switched it to an old drive.

RCourtney suggested as much RAM as possible. This helps avoid the use of swap, which is a good thing. In practice though, it doesn't really help that much as Vegas rarely ever ends up using swap. Spend your money on a faster processor. This gives the best overall render speed improvement; much much more so than spending the money on anything else.
kraz wrote on 11/18/2006, 8:23 AM
ok assuming I get the best processor I can - would you tell me to only get 1gig - or does 2 gig ive me a bang for buck ....

also still looking for ideas in terms of which swaps/temps/files/etc should be with with other ones ..

thanks
Allen
richard-courtney wrote on 11/18/2006, 9:15 AM
I am incorrect on the name: 3ware Escalade not 3com.
It is very fast for me but you say SATA are even faster... then by all means my next
powerhorse will be SATA drive equipped!

Is there such a thing as a SATA card? It would as bottle necked?
DavidSinger wrote on 11/18/2006, 1:00 PM
RCourtney,
Check the specs of your current MOBO. It might have an unused SATA port. If not, for about $120 just get a recent MOBO. As I mentioned, now they all seem to come defacto ASA and SATA, complete with a floppy disk or CD on which is a nice RAID0 driver for the SATA drives. Plug your current ASA drive (C:) and a new one ($70?) into the on-board ASA controller (C: for op system, D: for programs) and then get two honking bit SATA drives (say, 500gb) and RAID0 them for a terabyte of available work space. Swap in your PCI card and drive as a backup - or pop for a $199 USB external 500 drive for data backup.
Steve Mann wrote on 11/18/2006, 2:39 PM
You don't need RAID drives with Vegas. With Premiere and Pinnacle it was absolutely required, but I haven't had RAID drives for four years. My PC is a 2GHz Athlon with 1Gb of RAM. The "C" drive is a 100Gb drive for he O/S and applications, and all the Temp files created by Vegas or DVDDA. Drives "D", "E" and "F" are used for the work files for various projects I have going at any time. They were installed at various times and range from 200Gb to 350Gb. All of them are ATA drives.

Your Windows Virtual memory should be set to a fixed size - 2X the amount of RAM that you have.

I've recently started shooting in HDV so I definitely need a faster processor.

Steve M.