Rendering problems in Premiere 6 RT2000

[Hal]

Hi All,
I am starting to do NLE using:
Adobe Premiere 6.0
Matrox RT2000 NLE card
on this system:
ABIT BH6 v1.01 flashed to SS BIOS
PIII 800MHz (not overclocked)(ABIT site officially says PIII 600 supported, but others were successful, me too)
484MB RAM
Promise Fasttrak ATA100 RAID
card with 2 identical 45GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus HD's as the RAID array
WIN Me

The RAID passes the Matrox benchtest, but with low minimum speeds.
When I edit in Premiere, I crash every time I try to render something, whether it's a transition, scanned still, title, etc. Otherwise it seems to work fine.

What are the main hardware/software factors involved in ability to render? Could the low bench results be my main problem? How can I improve the throughput speeds of the RAID? In Device Mgr there is no selection available to enable DMA. The RAID appears fully functional except for the low mins.

Suggestions/advice appreciated.

Thanks,
Hal

[Dr Mordrid]

Hal,

You have two potential problems;

1. you have a Fasttrak100. Please install the FastCheck utility then open it from the systray. Now browse to its Options menu and UN-check the box next to the S.M.A.R.T. feature.

S.M.A.R.T. is a self-diagnostic feature for HD's that has never really lived up to it's billing. Mostly it causes problems by polling the drive every few seconds and causing dropped frames, playback issues and other such problems.

Even with satisfactor results in the benchmark program the S.M.A.R.T. "feature" will cause many transfer rate problems. I also suggest anyone with this feature available in their mainboard's BIOS to disable it as well. It's more trouble than it's worth.

2. If your DiamondMax drives are ATA100 and you have powered up less than 10 times since their installation then they likely are still running with Write Verification turned on. This is the default setup of Maxtor ATA100 drives, but it is *supposed to* turn itself off after 10 powerup cycles.

Maxtor has a utility, WVSET.EXE, on their download page for disabling Write Verification manually from DOS.

Check these out and see what happens....

Dr. Mordrid