Best setup for Video Editing/Rendering

Mint_Sauce · 3 Nov 2009 at 19:55

I'm building a friends system and the hard drives are a big part of getting his system right.

In order to get his machine throwing data around as fast as possible I was thinking something along the lines of:

1 x SSD for OS
5 x 1TB in Raid 5 with Areca ARC-1680 iX-12 or Perc 5i controller
2 x SSD in Raid 0 for scratch

Could this be improved on for HD video editing/rendering?

TIA

AbsenceJam · 3 Nov 2009 at 20:38

You only need (or rather want) good IOPS for the drive that you launch the application+resources/plugins from. For other disks/arrays it's all about sequential reads/writes, of course SSD's do have great read/write speeds but that's not the key part of their cost.

Does he already have a separate storage solution such as an eSATA or fibrechannel DAS?
You need at least one storage setup where files are stored, read from and written out to. But it can be good to have a second one where files are either copied to before being worked or to divide finished/unfinished storage. A DAS, NAS (Gbit is slow but if you copy internally before working it's okay) or internal RAID 5 array is good for this. It's of course good practice to have an additional backup in place, remember RAID is not backup.

Then you have scratch disks, faster the better of course - but remember to get as much RAM as possible first.

Mint_Sauce · 3 Nov 2009 at 23:55

Thanks AbsenceJam, I will be going for 12gb ram in the build along with an i7 processor.

He does back up all his projects/files to external hard drives so the raid 5 is for just day to day useage with that little extra to help in case of a failed drive. It would also I think be fast enough for storing the files and being working space whilst the 2xSSDs for scratch would (I think) be good for when he does a live preview (on the fly render basically).

I've done some reading on how Premier likes to work and I think that setup is basically exactly what it would like. Being new to SSDs is there any reasons why going for standard mechanical 7200 drives be better for scratch?

AbsenceJam · 4 Nov 2009 at 00:21

I think two SSD's could perhaps too small for scratch unless you get large ones, but it really depends on what he's working with. In some situations I'd be inclined to have more than one scratch volume for different asset types.
Mechanical drives have no advantage over SSD's except price. You can get better performance using multiple mech drives in RAID 0 for less than SSD's if you have the room for the disks.

See how he works, ID what actions take time and monitor CPU, RAM and Disk activity. For some things you're more CPU bound than disk and other times more volumes/disks can be better than fewer fast ones.

Mint_Sauce · 4 Nov 2009 at 19:39

Just looked quickly at Fibrechannel DAS and it looks like a great idea, maybe a much better alternative to having all those drives in the PC and having the RAID card in there as well. I'll look in to it further. Perhaps, just having the OS drive in the PC, then using the DAS (if it can be configured as two seperate arrays) for the storage and scratch.