Hello,

I've been asking a lot of entry-level tech questions lately, and much of it stems from the fact that i've recently built my own i7 workstation. Having said that, I had a question that arose out of buying a media drive.

Based on advice from this thread, i've decided to just use PPro CS3 and Prospect HD on Win 7 64bit Ultimate. It's pretty crazy cause I actualy have CS3 and CS4 installed at the same time and had both open concurrently as well. So far I havent had any issues yet, however, it's only been 2 days and I haven't really gone to town on it yet. Although, the real time playback monitor isn't a little pixelated, but im guessing its a cs3/64bit thing?? As I have a QuadraFX3800 installed, so i know it isnt the GPU. ANYWAY, my question.

STORAGE QUESTION
With my Prospect HD/PremeiereCS3/12gRAM, I7920 combo that I have going, does it really matter what kind of media drive I get? For example, on Videoguys.com they like to really pimp out the G-Tech Raids, or even G-tech esata drives.. BUT would it make a huge difference if I just went with a seperate internal sata drive?? as long as it keeps within the specs of 7200RPM and 32Cache?? Especially if I'm only editing HDV and h.264??? I could save a couple hundred (which I could put towards a nice lens or AE plug ins) if i went that route .

AUDIO QUESTION
Also, one thing that i really never ran into while researching DIY workstations, was the audio card. Of course much was put into getting a really good video card. Do I actually need to get a sound card, or do most people just rely on the native sound hardware built into their mobos?? im using an asus p6 deluxe (i think thats what its called). Is that sufficient with my aforementioned setup, or should i look into investing into a audio card as well??

Again, thanks in advance for any advice/help you can offer.

My experience with storage drives is anecdotal, I don't know how the specs would verify this. I would suggest an eSATA RAID. Mine is an old Simpletech.

First, the RAID gave me much snappier timeline response. Most off the shelf drives can easily provide the throughput required for playback, but the RAID is much more responsive.

Having an external unit is nice...... its own power supply, and heat is not an issue.

So far as audio, my guess is that onboard is fine. I do a lot of sound work and multitrack stuff, so I use a Tascam external USB unit. It's very nice to have a piece of hardware that offers separate controls for room monitors, headphones, and recording levels without having to navigate those via a mouse.

Hah... looks like you're not quite done spending money yet!

I would recommend also an external e-sata raid, I am getting an average transfer rate of 179.2 MB/s read/write to the array. choosing & raid card or onboard controller is critical as there are some dogs out there. My other array only gets about average 96.9 MB/s read/write but I use this only for backup, its also a raid 1 and not as fast.

I have 4 x (1.5 TB) in a raid5 set (4.5 TB available). Beware to back up this data though as the file system (not drives) on my array got corrupted recently although all the files were intact I could not open or play any cineform avi files any in any program. I tried multiple avi fixers to re-write headers etc but in the end gave up and recaptured from tape which took a week. I turns out that a number of crashes (blue screen premier special) had probably created bad sectors on the drive, it did an automatic chkdsk on boot-up at one point last week and I was unable to stop it in time, about half of the files on the array after the chkdsk were corrupted. I ran a low level format and restored all from tape.

I would highly suggest anyone using an array for video to disable automatic check disc in the registry, or at some point you might have an issue if your system crashes a lot.

If all you need the audio card for is playback, I would first try with the internal card and see if it works OK.

If you plan to record audio through the card, then consider an external card (USB or Firewire) that will be less suceptible than an internal card to electronic noise from the comupter's innards, and that will provide ASIO drivers for better channel management etc.

ASIO is also helpful if you are editing 5.1 channel audio.

I tried multiple avi fixers to re-write headers etc but in the end gave up and recaptured from tape which took a week.

Hey Rich.... I've had some file corruption over the years, and Restorer 2000 Pro is a miracle worker.

Thanks for the tip Marty! I have a few .mp4 files which I am desperatly trying to recover still but no luck, I will give this tool a shot.

Hmm, thanks for the advice. A couple follow ups.

Re: Storage. If using an external RAID0, what's your most efficient way to back things up? do you use/recommend any utilities, or is it just a copy/paste to a different drive?

Re: Audio. If i got another audio card, what works best with cineform?

I am sure everyone has a different approach to backups. For me, I have 4 drive arrays - 2 internal and 2 e-sata external. I am backing up all projects via trim to it's own dedicated hard drive, normally for my 22 min projects a 160 GB drive has enough space for the project and media assets, and these drives are cheap these days.

I have started to implement a new policy (since the crash) to backup data on the 4.5 TB RAID5 array also. Although I have the data on tape, this array is used for active or new projects and I am duplicating data via robocopy to a set of 2TB drives which are archived in a fireproof box. I also have an internal raid 0 SSD array that I use for media cache, audio and some other project related stuff, I robocopy that out to a raid1 array etc which I am also backing up pereodically. As far as the O/S drive, thats also an raid 0 SSD array but I am not worried about loosing the O/S as I have it ghosted and can restore the image in about 10 minutes in the event of a crash or virus. Hope that helps ~