Advice on how to set up my system.
I'm building a video editing rig for my father and me. We're going into wedding videos in a more professional way than we used to do.
This afternoon I'll get from a local dealer these things I previously ordered:
Abit AI7 (Intel i865PE / ICH5R)
P4 3Ghz 800FSB Northwood (yes only 512k hehe) pretty much cooler than Prescott and same performance.
2*512MB DDR400 Infineon
2*160gb Maxtor DiamondMax9 SATA 8mb
Radeon9600pro 256mb
Nec 3500A dual DVD burner
Ok, I was pretty sure I wanted RAID0, I was dreaming with it for several years, and now I can do it, I'm not sure if I should. I've been reading a lot on SM and storagereview.com and other pages about the raid0 vs. single drive affair. I would say, in a humble way, I'm quite informed about the pros and cons.
But now it's time to take decisions, I'll get my computer this afternoon and I have to set it up.
I know best among the best option would be a single drive for the OS and programs, and a raid0 array for the video. But please don't consider that because I already ran out of money. About the storage, I need this huge amount of gigs because I'm doing DV editing. I was getting 2*120gb WD but my local dealer had only 120gb seagates and 160gb maxtors, so I picked the maxtors according to the benchmarks I have seen.
So now, what would you do? RAID0 or leave the maxtors as single drives?
I know another wise solution would be a single 80gig for OS and programs, and a single 200+ gig for the video, but that's mainly the same question as always: two separated drives, whatever the size of them is, so please just focus on raid0 vs. single drive again, considering what I am using this rig for.
I would love to see a bench on my computer with 100+ mb/s but maybe that's not what I need. It's true I'll be needing fast sequential reads and writes when joining video, that's hdd limited, but when editing or compressing to MPEG2, the main end of this rig, my bottleneck will be my CPU, so hdd speed is not critical.
Plus, my programs and my OS, including paging file, would be in the same array, the only one I have if I raid. How would that affect performance?
Would be better to have it separated?
Do you reccomend to set the page file to a fixed size, to avoid fragmenting it when it rises the size automatically? What amount should I set it to? Remember I have 1gig of ram. I plan on run Diskeeper to mantain it to the outer edge of the disk.
And as you can imagine, I would like to fine tune my hdd subsystem as much as I can, so any other ideas and advices are welcome.
TIA and sorry for the long text.
This afternoon I'll get from a local dealer these things I previously ordered:
Abit AI7 (Intel i865PE / ICH5R)
P4 3Ghz 800FSB Northwood (yes only 512k hehe) pretty much cooler than Prescott and same performance.
2*512MB DDR400 Infineon
2*160gb Maxtor DiamondMax9 SATA 8mb
Radeon9600pro 256mb
Nec 3500A dual DVD burner
Ok, I was pretty sure I wanted RAID0, I was dreaming with it for several years, and now I can do it, I'm not sure if I should. I've been reading a lot on SM and storagereview.com and other pages about the raid0 vs. single drive affair. I would say, in a humble way, I'm quite informed about the pros and cons.
But now it's time to take decisions, I'll get my computer this afternoon and I have to set it up.
I know best among the best option would be a single drive for the OS and programs, and a raid0 array for the video. But please don't consider that because I already ran out of money. About the storage, I need this huge amount of gigs because I'm doing DV editing. I was getting 2*120gb WD but my local dealer had only 120gb seagates and 160gb maxtors, so I picked the maxtors according to the benchmarks I have seen.
So now, what would you do? RAID0 or leave the maxtors as single drives?
I know another wise solution would be a single 80gig for OS and programs, and a single 200+ gig for the video, but that's mainly the same question as always: two separated drives, whatever the size of them is, so please just focus on raid0 vs. single drive again, considering what I am using this rig for.
I would love to see a bench on my computer with 100+ mb/s but maybe that's not what I need. It's true I'll be needing fast sequential reads and writes when joining video, that's hdd limited, but when editing or compressing to MPEG2, the main end of this rig, my bottleneck will be my CPU, so hdd speed is not critical.
Plus, my programs and my OS, including paging file, would be in the same array, the only one I have if I raid. How would that affect performance?
Would be better to have it separated?
Do you reccomend to set the page file to a fixed size, to avoid fragmenting it when it rises the size automatically? What amount should I set it to? Remember I have 1gig of ram. I plan on run Diskeeper to mantain it to the outer edge of the disk.
And as you can imagine, I would like to fine tune my hdd subsystem as much as I can, so any other ideas and advices are welcome.
TIA and sorry for the long text.
0
Comments
My advice is to put all OS, prog and finished work on one drive and only write working files to the other. That way the second drive can we wiped clean to eliminate file fragments and other trash.
I'll let MM and Tex give you the real dope.
Yeah, that's the wisest choice man... The safest and the one wich needs less setup time.
But I still think I would go with RAID0, because I think performance would never be worse, at most just equal in some tasks, and here we enter in some kind of personal desire... Not a mathematical item of the equation.
I would like to hear what the experts have to say here, considering my particular situation and the target of my computer.
My work is important and I can't lose a happily married couple of young people's wedding video but... are two brand new maxtor diamondMax 9 going to fail? I hope not...