video editing build

[Ken g6]

is that pretty much JUST for the video? hes not going to be doing anything too crazy, he has a few hundred hours of videos of his kids and stuff he wants to edit convert ETC.

Pretty much everything we've recommended has been JUST for the video, because that's all you said he'd be doing with it. Does he have other requirements? Does the video editing not have to be professional quality and/or professional speed?

 

[mfenn]

Better than nothing. A drive failure is a common enough occurrence, and I have the sneaking suspicion he won't be backing his data files and working projects up as well as we'd all like to see.

IMHO, buying a couple of drives and then putting them in RAID is definitely worse than dedicating one to backup and setting up an automated backup process. RAID is for uptime, backups are for data protection.

Even full-blown software RAID won't eat enough CPU to counterbalance the throughput gains. And your MBs RAID controller isn't that lame. (Better not be... what the hell?)

Yes, the mobo RAID controller is that lame. The expensive part of a real RAID controller is the processor that does all the parity calculations, mobo fakeraid offloads all of that work to the CPU. That's not to say that a modern quad-core CPU won't be able to handle some extra load, but it isn't ideal.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

IMHO, buying a couple of drives and then putting them in RAID is definitely worse than dedicating one to backup and setting up an automated backup process. RAID is for uptime, backups are for data protection.

Of course he should be archiving: RAID is for speed. A single HDD will still bottleneck a video editing workstation. Adding a third drive for RAID 5 just saves potential headaches if a drive fails.

Yes, the mobo RAID controller is that lame. The expensive part of a real RAID controller is the processor that does all the parity calculations, mobo fakeraid offloads all of that work to the CPU. That's not to say that a modern quad-core CPU won't be able to handle some extra load, but it isn't ideal.

Again, better the faster throughput at the cost of a few CPU cycles.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

also what do you mean by scratch disk.

I don't mean "scratch disk" in the Photoshop sense (basically a swap file.)

A dedicated drive for importing/editing/exporting improves performance, takes load off your boot drive, and decreases the likelihood of random I/O from the operating system and/or housekeeping programs interfering with video captures.

The faster the drive, the more simultaneous streams of data can be read and/or written. (MOAR is BETTAR!)

Once upon a time, I did it all on a single drive. (Hey, I was young.) An automated virus scan started while I was capturing. 90 minutes later, when I came back, I had to start over.

Life is too short not to use a dedicated drive.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Of course, when I started video editing, a single HDD only did 10-20 MB/sec, and had like 1MB caches. You basically needed RAID-0 to do 480p capture reliably. So I may be recommending RAID more from habit than necessity.

 

[Zargon]

well an OS drive + ssd cache, and a video drive + backup drive are way easier

3 hdds is way better than telling him to buy 5 or 6


I'll let him know, and let his want and wallet decide