Fastest Performance for Video Editing & Rendering

[daveoasis]

Would I be best off with the fastest SATA multiple drives or fastest SCSI? Or a combo of these drives. Costs would helpful to know.

Thanks, Dave

 

[rvnguy]

I do neither video editing or rendering.

I would theorize that this process was/is CPU or GPU intensive and this would be the limiting factor and not the HD speed.

If I am incorrect in where the actual bottle neck is and if it is in HD I/O; SCSI is currently the fastest by a small margin but at approx 3X the cost.

If the information is temporary to the drive and back or?? and a fast scratch zone is required, I guess I would suggest RAID '0' to almost double the speed but when complete would transfer the results to some other redundant volume as I would suppose that you might have a sinificant investment in the product and would not want to lose the results.

rvnguy
"I know everything..I just can't remember it all

 

[daveoasis]

Hi rvnguy: Some background. When one video user put 2nd HD on his PC, then did rendering, the rendering time was cut in half approx. I'll find out specifics. Thank you, Dave.

 

[cdogg]

Rendering time is extremely CPU intensive, unless you have a professional video editing graphics card. Cards like the RT.X100 from Matrox off-load a lot of the rendering away from the CPU.

I would say the hard drive has very little to do with overall speed. Remember, an average hard drive transfers at 35MB/s or faster. When editing video, the rates usually average below 5MB/s depending on the type of effects you are applying. So adding another hard drive or setting up a fast RAID array will likely have little or no effect.

In your example, the user may have been really low on free space, forcing the hard drive to operate much slower than usual. It's possible that in those situations, adding a 2nd drive with nothing on it helped out a bit. Double the performance though is hard to believe. Upgrading to a professional card is the only way I know of to get that kind of result.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[Frank4d]

If you are doing video capture, processing the captured video (the possibilities are endless), and then displaying it, check out the Matrox XPRO and XG board set. About $9,000 though.

 

[daveoasis]

Thanks everyone. Very interesting feedback. Dave

 

[flavor4real2]

I would go SCSI. a Ultra3 SCSI-3 drive transfer to 160MBps and has a busspeed of 40Mhz, and a RPM of 10000. A 73 GB SCSI Harddrive like this one cost $45.

A Good Harddrive is always good. or at least a few of it, u don't want to have corrupt files after u worked for weeks on ur project.

also a cpu that handles strong, lots of memory, a strong motherboard.. hope it helps

 

[kiddpete]

Most pros recommend a dedicated drive for the video. It should not be captured on the same drive that programs are using. Rendering is cpu intensive, and probably benefits only slightly from faster disk performance.