Well I am happy to report after a solid day of editing that my new configuration works amazingly well comparted to my old raid 5 setup. Everything was working as advertised. I now run all my footage and scratch disks from the 4 disk raid 0 array with project files on my ssd OS Drive and the back up footage and Project files backups on the External Raid 5 Array.

The only problems I encountered was when I was trying to create a funky slideshow with JPGs I took with my 7D, I didn't scale them down so they were full 18mp resolution. After the project began to become pretty complicated it has become very unstable and keeps crashing with an Nvidia Error, saying something like my system does not meet minimum requirments. Something like that. I dug around and found others were having the same issue when trying to edit picture in their timelines. Looks like I will have to build it in AE.

The other problem was stutter on 2 random clips with a disolve added. After digging more I finally found that CS5 has a know issue with AVCHD Footage that has a dissolve between 2 parts of the same clip. So I tried the work around of making a copy of the footage in explorer and importing the copy. Then using that for the second clip in the timeline. Bingo! It worked.

Multiple layers are so far playing like butter. Lets hope it holds up as the sequences get more complicated as they get nearer to completion.

Thanks for all your help.

This post is awesome, thanks!

I have a pretty awesome system set up like the 2 drive right now, but want to go to the 3 drive. Here are my questions:

--EDITED--

• Does the Scratch disks need to be fault tolerant? I understand an outage would interupt between saves, but I think it saves to the project file the scratch contents.
• For editing 2 hour features of Canon footage, can I get away with a scratch drive of 64GB SSD or do I need lots bigger?

Thanks again for the great info!

Hi Harm,

Sorry but i don't speak english very weel. I need your help because I want to build a new PC for video and photo editing (SD and HD video).

My problem is for hdd configuration; I don't have problem to buy 4, 5 or 6 HDD but I don't know how many TB are necessary for the scratch/temp disk and where is important to have a RAID 0.

My idea is this:

1 x 120 GB SSD for OS/software

1 x 600 GB 10'000 RPM for Scratch / Temp / Pagefile

2 x 600 GB 10'000 RPM in RAID 0 for Media / Project

2 x 600 GB 10'000 RPM in RAID 0 for Export / Final file

What do you think about this?

Thank you and best regards

Andrea Pedrotti

Hi Harm

I've got something odd going on with 1 of my 5 F3 HDDs

In device manager, 1 of the drives is showing up as a SCSI device and that drive is being referenced as a removable device through the oprion to "safely remove hardware and eject media". I acted on removal and it then disappears from the system until reboot.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Edit: no Raid yet. All drives are plugged into Mobo sata ports.

Harm,

When i'm exporting or rendering a movie to my final video, wich HDD are working? Temp and Exporting or My Project too?

So you tell me tha  scratch, temp and pagefile HDD need speed and not space.

I can buy this configuration, what you think?

1 x 128 GB SSD for OS/software

1 x 256 GB SSD for Scratch / Temp / Pagefile

2 x 600 GB 10'000 RPM in RAID 0 for Media / Project / Export / Final file

I don't need a lot of space because when my movie is finished I transfer them to my NAS with a RAID 5

Best regards

Andrea

They don't all need to be inside your system as long as you have them linked in with esata. I am running a 4 disk raid 0 internally for scratch and a external 4 disk raid 5 connected with esata for footage storage. USB will be to slow. Not sure about firewire but my money would say it is also to slow. Esata will give you the same transfer rates as though it were internally connected with sata.

My set has been great so far.

I am having a terrible time getting a raid 3 setup with an areca 1680ix-12...am I supposed to include the OS disk in the raid or leave it seperate? I've only gotten as far as BIOS configuration creating a raid set. It shows all of the drives I have connected, 1 150gb velociraptor, 4 1tb samsung f3's, and 1 F3 hot spare. It's telling me that I only have 600gb total space. I really cannot figure out where to go from here, any help would be greatly appreciated!

Alex, I feel your pain.

Whether or not to include the OS drive in the RAID depends on what the RAID is for.  However, in the context of the rest of this thread, I am going to assume you are building a large RAID for storage of footage as you work on it.  In that case, keep the OS drive separate.  Install the OS drive on the motherboard, and the raid drives on the areca card only.  The areca card I had my tech use had a limit of 4 drives.  I ended up with three drives in a RAID 3 with a hot spare also on the card.  That shows up as 1.81 TB for the four drives, which is about right, considering one drive is the spare, one is for parity info, and the other two lose ~28 GB in the format. My OS drive is another 640 Gb.

I don't know the specs on your card, but these are things to watch for.

BTW my tech warned me that formatting the RAID took him nearly 20 hours, but that was necessary in order to get it to show capacity.

Alex, Windows 7 gets confused and stupid sometimes when you try to install it with all of your drives hooked up. With both installations I've done it has failed when all of my hard drives are hooked up. DISCONNECT all of your drives and only leave the C drive connected (that you are installing Win 7 on), and you should not have a problem. You can leave the power cables plugged in on the extra drives, just disconnect the SATA cables.

Now, if Windows still doesn't see your C drive, hop into your BIOS and make sure you can see it there. If you can't, then Windows can't, so check your cables/connections/etc. Are you doing a RAID set for your C drive? I suggest you don't (see next paragraph), but if you are, make sure the RAID settings are correct, and make sure you have the latest BIOS from the manufacturer. You may have to use a separate PC and make a CD of the BIOS updater or however your mobo company does BIOS updates. Bottom line: you need to see your drive in the BIOS in order for Windows to see it.

I didn't read all of your posts, but I'll just throw out some suggestions... you may know all this, so disregard if you do, but I'll just do a quick brain dump here: If you have a 10K drive like a Raptor, install Win 7 and the Adobe suite on THAT, it isn't worth the headache to RAID your OS drive IMO. Zero RAID isn't that much faster than a 10K drive especially if you're using onboard RAID on your mobo, and you do NOT need to RAID1 your OS drive "for protection". Instead, once you have your OS and Adobe stuff and plugins installed and set up on your C drive, you then use Windows Backup and Restore to create an image of your C drive, so you can restore it at any point in time. Your C drive, once set up, should never change. Don't use MY Documents and all that for your files, that bloats your profile and adds unnecessary stuff to your C drive. Keep it LEAN. Store your files on some other drive. I bought a WD 1TB Caviar Black for $75 on sale, gave it the drive letter J and labelled it "Junk", and that's where all my non-editing personal files and stuff goes. Great place to put your Paging file also. And make a folder called Scratch Disks and point Premiere and the other apps to use that for scratch disks. Again, keep the C drive clean. Newegg was selling the 150GB Raptors for $99 last week, and that sale will probably repeat.

The RAID setup I saw mentioned should be for your assets, you need hyper-fast read speed when editing. Yes, the MPE and CUDA in video cards are amazing, but not limitless. So, RAID your assets drive, pop the scratch disk on a separate drive, keep the C drive immutable once it is setup, and you'll have a good system.

With my i7, 12GB ram and 470SC card I get great performance using this drive config:

300GB Raptor: C drive for Win 7 and Adobe software

Two WD 1TB RE3s in RAID0 for assets, video and audio

750GB Caviar Black for Project files and Encore files

750GB Caviar Black for Photo files (I'm a photographer and keep all of my stills on a separate drive)

1TB Caviar Black for Page file, Scratch disks and all other files that are not assets or project files, basically my junk drawer.

I do break the rules and use my PC for other stuff since it's my only PC (Microsoft Visual Studio programming, SQL Server database and Microsoft Office). That should get Harm wanting to hit me, lol! SO, what I did was add another 320GB inexpensive WD drive, and when the Microsoft installer pops up with the default "C:\Program Files(86)\software name" install path, I change the C: to the drive letter of the 320GB drive so it all installs on there. When I edit, I go into task manager and stop all the Microsoft services to free up bandwidth. I'm comfortable doing that but some may not be. A separate PC for Office/etc is highly suggested, but for now what I have is what I have so I deal with it.

OK, brain dump over. If you get some help from 5% of what I wrote I'd be happy! Not everyone may agree with how I set up my rig, but I hope the first part of this post gets you through installation pain.

Thanks for all of the helpful info guys. I finally got windows 7 installed on the raptor, had to do some reformatting to be able to get my pc to see it...caused me hours of headaches! So now I am finally ready to start installing the raid. Here's how i'm thinking of setting it up:

Raptor 150gb -C: win 7, program files

4 1 tb F3's - project files, media, etc

1 F3 for hot spare

Now I am also a photographer as well...Paulie, you put all of your photos on a seperate drive correct? Would you recommend buying an external for this? I'll be running photoshop and various other programs with the adobe production suite.

Time to start installing raid, I'll probably have more questions but hopefullly it goes smoothly!

Thanks for the tips Paulie...I'm going to keep my photos on the raid, why not? I can't afford to lose those either! I realize now that I need a scratch disk as well, don't know why I did not think of this sooner! I'm just using an external drive via firewire currently to allow me to start messing around with premiere and make a couple edits, but I'm looking to order another 1 TB drive solely for scratch. Are there any recommendations for this drive, does it need to be 7200 rpm or is 5400 just fine?

Alex, repeat after me: "I will never use a hard drive slower than 7200rpm. I will never use a hard drive slower than 7200rpm. I will never..."

I'm glad Harm replied with a link to his thread. That was a great help for me too.

Ooo, I didn't even know separate cache ram existed on a mobo (I have my newbie moments, believe me).

Harm???

AH, good, explains that!

Planning to get an Areca ARC-1210 with four 600GB Velociraptors in RAID 0 (considering R3, but I can set up daily back ups, not too worried about the data). Would there be a RAID controller better suited for this without increasing price too much (~$300)? All reviews I read point to Areca and the next best controller I see is the ARC-1231ML at $600. I have 4 other Western Digital Black 1TB's that are not in RAID currently (don't really plan to either) and an 80GB SSD as a boot drive. Thanks!

WD Blacks are 7,200RPM, Raptors are 10,000RPM. But also, Blacks are not always a good RAID choice, they have time-out circuitry that corrects for erros when standalone, but can cause RAID to drop. Hence, the WD RE3 drives, made for RAID, no timeout circuitry.

I'm not sure I understand your recommendations for four disks. "D: or E: and F: can be run in Raid0".  Does that mean D: and F: or E: and F:? Or does it mean D: or E: and F:? That's not the same. Hope you understand my confusion.

I run automatically in this four disk configuration because the SSD I would like to buy (C300) has excellent reads but slow writes. So it is good for OS/Programs and bad for the page file.