Best Hard Drive Setup?

[Wildcat]

I am looking to upgrade my hard drive storage setup to optimize it for video editing. I am trying to do it for under $500. I have a 20 gig fireball LM and Asus PV34X MB to start. any sugestions would be appreciated.

[Dr Mordrid]

I like Fasttrak RAID arrays with Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 drives. Here would be the breakdown on a very fast setup;

Fasttrak100: $95.95 at http://www.buy.com .

Two Maxtor 30 gig DMax Plus 40's: ~$160-180 each

This would give you a 60 gig RAID array capable of 36-40 megs/second, more than enough to capture uncompressed video when need be. Also playbacks are enhanced by the excess speed.

I have Fasttrak RAIDs on several of my systems with one sporting three 40 gig Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40's in a 120 gig array. This one can do well over 50 megs/second. It's also huge

Use the Fireball for your boot drive. Video editing and graphics software will eat up 20 gigs soon enough

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 30 July 2000).]

[xortam]

Dr Mordrid, What are you using to measure your disk performance? What RAID level do you run at? What is your stripe size? What are the specs (RPM, avg. seek, cache) on the drives (I suppose I could look that one up). Thanks.

[Dr Mordrid]

Benches: Sisoft's SANDRA, Adaptec's Threadmark 2.0 & DiskSpeed32.

RAID level: RAID0, striped array.

Sector size: 64k.

Drive specs: ATA66, 7,200 rpm, 9ms, 2 mb buffer.

All the "usual" disk optimnizations done; vcache restricted, write-behind cache disabled etc.

Also; 2 ATA100 Deskstar 75GXP drives on a Fasttrak100 bench at 68-70 mb/s.

Tip on the newer Maxtor drives: they have write verification turned on by default for the first 10 powerup cycles, so tests done in this timeframe mean nothing. After these 10 powerups write verification turns off and performance increases drastically. I have no idea why they do this, but there is a utility on their download page to turn it off manually.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 30 July 2000).]

[xortam]

Thanks for the information. I'll check out those benchmark apps. Did you by chance run benchmarks on a 16k stripe size? I'd be interested in those throughput numbers. Is 64K the maximum stripe size for your controller? If not, why did you choose that size? What OS, FS do you use on the array? Do you boot up off of the array? Can you point me to any documentation that delineates all of these FS/disk optimizations?

I'm interested in capturing broadcast TV onto my RAID array; I understand this is referred to as PC-VCR. I have a BUD (Big Ugly Dish) analog satellite receiver. I was wondering what the exact throughput requirements are for NTSC TV. I'll be upgrading to a digital receiver and an HDTV decoder. Do you know what the throughput requirements are to handle 720p and 1080i HDTV are? I imagine were talking about some sizable storage requirements when it comes to HDTV. I'm not aware of any appropriate capture card yet but I've seen some vendors starting to talk about HDTV.

So many questions. I appreciate any answers you can provide.

[Dr Mordrid]

64k was the default size. The testing was done under Win98SE/FAT32.

When you do testing on your own drives ignore any composite or buffered figures given by the benchmark and look only at the UNbuffered sequential read and UNbuffered sequential write speeds reported. These are the tests that most directly pertain to NLE.

You NEVER want to use a video drive or array for the OS....EVER. This is a NLE no-no. The OS and swapfile should always be on a totally separate drive, and preferrably on another controller. This is to prevent any writing to the boot drive by the editor or the OS causing an interruption in the data flow to or from the video device.

Matrox has a set of suggested optimizations for NLE that apply across the board. You might want to check them out;

http://www.matrox.com/mga/tech_supp/faq/video6.htm#55

One that I might add would be to move the Windows TEMP and TMP assignments to a new TEMP folder located on the video drive. This is because some editors store pre-rendered video sequences, particularly those with applied special effects, in the TEMP folder. These should be on the video device for optimum playback and to prevent the OS drive from filling up and causing an error. This is done by adding this to the autoexec.bat:

SET TEMP=D:\TEMP
SET TMP=D:\TEMP

with D:\ being the video device.

Most of the time it's useful to create a special user profile with these changes just for use with editing. Alternatively you might want to set up a multiboot system using System Commander with an entirely separate Windows installation for editing.

I've used both techniques and they are well worth doing if your system will also be used for non-NLE purposes.

I doubt if there are many consumer HDTV devices about because of the low level of HDTV TV's in the market. This will likely change but for now....

I can give you an idea of the range of data rates commonly used for NTSC with the current 4:3 video standard and various formats at the 704x480 and 720x480 frame sizes. The figures for HDTV will lilely be somewhat north of these:

MJPeg (motion JPeg): 3 to 15 mb/sec

MPEG-2 (DVD's format): up to 9 mb/sec

DV 25 (consumer DV): 3.6 mb/sec

DV 50 (professional DV): 7.2 mb/s

RGB (uncompressed): at least 30 mb/sec

YUV (uncompressed): at least 21 mb/sec

and for good measure,

DualStreaming: at least DOUBLE the single stream data rate for the codec being used

Dualstreaming is used on devices like the RT-2000 where two video streams, a transition, a filter and a graphics layer with an alpha channel, can all be played back simultaneously for doing realtime special effects. A VERY powerful feature and one the RT-2000 excells at.

It's very useful to have a healthy excess of speed on the video drive. This can overcome problems that can arise from the data rate unexpectedly raising over your expectations and system glitches. It also allows efficient use of uncompressed video, which is the best format in which to add many special F/X like bluescreening or complex overlay effects.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 30 July 2000).]

[Todd1]

Wildcat,

You should do a search on this forum using the key word: Fasttrak. Some people have trouble getting the card to work. I've been struggling with my Fasttrak 66 for two months now without success. The cost of the card is negligible but the frustration . . . I've wasted so much time it hurts.

[xortam]

Thanks for the info Dr Mordrid. I've had a Mylex (a.k.a. Buslogic) SCSI RAID in my current system since I bought it over a year ago. I use the 16K stripe size since its currently only used for normal desktop work. I had thought a separate OS disk subsystem made sense; just wanted to hear what the practitioners were doing. I'm very slowly migrating this system into a convergence platform and I wanted RAID to help provide me with the needed throughput. I think the HDTV requirements are roughly four times that of NTSC; I'll work through the numbers. The HDTV display has been the gating issue on getting the rest of the needed equipment. I don't know how much NLE, etc. I'll be doing but it does have my interest ... just to play with it. Also toyed with the idea of getting a digital 8 camcorder (since it supports my old analog 8mm recordings). I understand these also use DV format so it should be a good NTSC capture/storage device.

------------------

• ASUS P2B-S, PIII 450MHz, Award ACPI BIOS v1010, 128 MB RAM
• MYLEX FlashPoint RAID+ (BIOS v2.02N) running RAID 0 on two 9 GB IBM DDRS 39130D Disks
• Diamond MX300 sound card, now with MX25 S/PDIF output
• Matrox Millennium G400 Max Dual Head - English
• NEC 5FG monitor
• Logitech MouseMan Wheel
• YAMAHA CRW4416S and NEC Multispin 3x CDs
• 3Com Fast EtherLink XL 10/100Mb TX NIC (3C905B-TX)
• US Robotics 56K Voice FaxModem Pro
• Pioneer DVD-303S SCSI
• Note--All SCSI devices (except disk drives on RAID) are connected to onboard AIC7890 U2W SCSI
• Mainly running Win98 v4.10.1998

[Dr Mordrid]

Todd1:

What problems are you having? Mail me private if you want to....

Dr. Mordrid