Raid or no

[Gunn]

My new computer has four 500gb Sata drives. Two are striped together and the only thing on them is the operating system. The other two are independent. All are running off the mother board. What is the best configuration for editing HD on Edius Broadcast? I will be storing on an external drive (firewire or usb2?).

Any body heard anything about 4.6?

Thanks

[pjsssss]

I like to run the OS on a single drive and then RAID several drives for HD work. I presently have 1 OS drive, 2 individual 500G drives and one 4 drive 2T RAID. It is up to you whether you want to go RAID 0 or some type of backup RAID.

In your setup, I would have the OS on one 500G drive and then either RAID the other 2 or 3 depending on your preferences in my above paragraph.

[pjsssss]

I think 4.6 will show up "soon".

[Blast1]

The raid is unnecessary for the OS, a single drive is sufficient, a raid is better for video data particularly flavors of HD, the extra drive can be used for Aux storage for sound, caches, previews, etc.

[Bluetongue]

My set up is
One single drive for OS
3 sets of 2 400GB drives set up as Raid 0 striped, using the MB raid controller
It is possible to set all 6 up in a single raid drive, although it is faster Edius does not need the ultimate speed even for HDV and it is too hard to manage one huge drive especially when it becomes fragmented.
By having a number of drives defrag can be done either by copying files between the drives or using defrag, depends on your preference either way has its advantages and disadvantages.
On disk benchmark my drives WD 7200 rpm in raid 0 transfer between drives at around 100Mb/s copy and rewrite to the same drive at around 50 Mb/s.
Edius using Canopus HQ for HDV requires around 20Mb/s so even if you used SATA drives singly there is more than enough speed.
Hope this helps
Regards Barry

[GrassValley_BH]

I RAID 1 (mirror) all my system drives now because it's very annoying for me to reinstall the OS on drive failure and I admit to having a rudimentary backup plan at best. :(

[RonnieMartin]

Hey Brandon: Is is possible to install a mirror drive for you os drive after the fact? I would would like to have a mirror set up like you are using but don't want to go back and reinstall everything.

Thanks

Ronnie

[Ron Evans]

I prefer to run with no RAID. My current set up is OS drive, Temp drive, 3 drives for storage and 2 external drives for extra storage and backups. Backups of OS and project files are on external drives that I only power up for these backups. Camera files for a multicam shoot are put on separate drives so that no one drive is being accessed for multiple files. Putting all camera files and temp files on a single RAID will be potentially slower than the separate drive solution because of the multiple access and the drive throughput is no faster. Two drives accessing multiple files will consume a lot of time in accessing whereas on separate drives the files will be contiguous and just read out at drive speed. Dealing with uncompressed and animation files is different though where files size is large and drive throughput maybe critical requiring a single RAID to manage one file. For DV and HDV files transfer isn't a problem so in my mind for these files a RAID 0 just makes file management easier but with the downside of potentially loosing everything and for multiple files may be slower!!!!

Ron Evans

[Imagine Video]

Ron

Are you saying you capture to one drive? is a single sata drive?

Do you find a single drive setup enough for HDV work?

Do you capture in HQ?

I am intrested as I have just gone through a new system build and was convinced I needed a raid setup for hdv HQ


Cath

[GrassValley_BH]

Hey Brandon: Is is possible to install a mirror drive for you os drive after the fact? I would would like to have a mirror set up like you are using but don't want to go back and reinstall everything.

Yes, but the trick is to get the RAID controller driver installed *first* otherwise the OS won't be able to access the drive and you'll get an INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error.

With most RAID controllers you can... (Now is a good time to image your system, just in case something goes wrong)

1. Install RAID controller without any drives attached (this so Windows can install the driver)
2. Shut down Windows, connect the System drive and mirror drive to the controller. Make sure you know which drive is on which port!
3. Start up the system, go into the RAID controller's configuration, set up a RAID1 mirror.
4. Tell it to Duplicate the System drive to the other drive (this is why you needed to know which drive was connected where).

I've successfully done this with HighPoint RocketRAID cards as well as a Silicon Image (SiI) SATA RAID card.

[Bluetongue]

Do you find a single drive setup enough for HDV work?

Do you capture in HQ?
Cath

Cath a single drive on USB2 is sufficient to capture HDV Canopus HQ it needs around 20Mb/s and a 7200rpm drive on USB2 will transfer at around 24Mb/s about 1Mb/s slower than if the drive was on the MB.
I use a USB2 drive on my lap top while travelling, BUT for serious editing with HDV, multiple clips, large files Plus numerous audio tracks you can get some congestion and stuttering due to a lack of through put and access time.
I like the idea of placing different camera clips on separate drives when doing a multi camera shoot as the problem will come not from through put but on access time for the drive to jump from one file to the other on a single disk.
I use raid for 2 reasons
1: it gives a larger drive
2: Faster through put and rely on the system cache for access time, I have multiple RAID drives so files can be place on different drives for as explained before.
Hope this helps
Regards Barry

[Ron Evans]

In my mind one needs at least three drives on an editing system. One for OS, one for temp files and at least one for storage. Native HDV is the same data rate as DV it just places a greater load on the cpu and decode software. I find the latest versions of Edius and Vegas will edit native HDV almost as if it was DV. I only use external drives for copy operations not editing. Though for my next system upgrade I will get some eSata boxes. I use "DV Capture" for DV and capture normally two cameras at a time to separate drives. Camera 1 to drive A and camera 2 to drive B, etc. Since these drives are only used for long clips ( over an hour at a time in most cases) these files end up being contiguous on the drives. All my storage drives can sustain greater than 50MBs ( DV and HDV only need just over 3MBs so reading or writing one file at a time is no problem). For HDV I use Vegas to capture ( just find it easier than Edius). My AMD 4200X2, 2G RAM has no problem editing native HDV with Edius 4.5. Multi cam is just a little more stressful on the buffer but mixed track responds much like DV. I don't use HQ as most of projects are DV multicam and are just cuts between cameras with output going to DV avi. Most of my HDV from my FX1 is family stuff mixed with AVCHD from Sony SR7 and frankly Vegas 8 is better at dealing with this mix in native form than Edius.

Ron Evans

[SoundFreak]

Hi All,

To use Raid for OS drive is a bit overkill for us as end users, nothing much to gain from there besides less money in the pocket.
If you are afraid of OS crash / Boot drive failure use something like Acronis Disk Director or any Partion Image software and keep the OS partition Backup on a seprate HD in / out the System.

Every Month or so I copy back the Original Installed OS complete with all my audio / video apps that take almost 1 full day to install and fine tune all the settings from the backup partition and only takes about 10 Minutes or so before the system is up & running again.
Even a mirrored OS raid (if not hot swappable) will take longer to exchange a faulty drive than that, and certainly can't beat the 40 of 50 Bucks for the software, right ?

To have Raid on your video drives has lots of advantage what speed concerns, even on slower systems (like an old P4) working with striped raid makes the system more responsive as long as the raid size is not too large and doesn't become fragmented.

Sizes from 500 Mb towards 1TB are recommended, easy to manage files and defragmentation.
Need more video storage space, use multiple e.q. 1TB raids, more user friendly to manage than 1 super large one.

To have non Raid for backup storage is usual sufficient as a back is normally not used much or at all.

There are always other setups possible due to budget constrain or overflow (with some), work according to your own liking and budget, nothing is right or wrong, only more or less useful and efficient.

For myself, as my work is still 100% DV , I use 6 x5 00Gb stata II drivers on a Dual Dual Core Xeon System (more than plenty power & speed), I assume, and by reading a lot on forums (not only here), that for HD you will see some bigger differences, when you work with uncompressed video (any format) you will, sort of, need fast & large raid . . . . . . .

As long as you remember NOTHING is perfect, the world of editing will be a great place to be.

[SoundFreak]

Come to think, back in the P4 Mhz days with E-Ide drivers the striped raid really did wonders what transfer data rate concerns.

Nowadays with Sata II drives Raid or Non Naid it does not make that big a difference anymore (my feelings)

What would be the best setup if you are doing very complex editing ? Think Extreme here !

If you're raid is too big, all your files will be on the same pair of drives given you reading / writing heads not much pause to breathe in between read / write sessions.

If you have too many files scattered over several raids the processor(s) are continuously tried to paste things together.

Some food for thought here .............

[Imagine Video]

I see Ron you are happy working in native HDV.

I decided I would work the other way and make use of the canopus HQ codec and edit in this. This however warrents the use of a raided drive setup as file sizes are somewhat larger than native HDV.

Bluetongue :-)

yes a clear answere as always and after a little initial difficulty in understanding the differences from NATIVE and HQ HDV files I understand the system requirements more fully! thanks to you and a few others here!

My system is almost up and running just waiting for some SATA 2 caddies to arrive.

Cath