New editing build - recommendations?

[Jody Arnott]

Hi guys,

Hoping to get some opinions from Avid editors. I'm currently building a new editing system for Avid MC 7.0, and I'm trying to set it up for best possible performance (without spending a fortune).

Until now I've just used a USB 3.0 external hard drive as my editing drive, but it seems to struggle when I'm editing larger projects, so I'm particularly thinking about how to optimise I/O performance.

I've decided on a 6-core i7 CPU and a Quadro K4000, so that side of it should be fine. But in terms or storage, I'm not quite sure of the best way to set it up. This is my current thinking:

Media/editing drive - 2x 512GB solid-state drives (RAID 0)
Backup/storage drive - 2x 3TB hard drives (RAID 1)
Scratch drive - I was thinking of using another 256GB SSD for renders/effects etc. Is this beneficial?

Any comments/suggestions would be really appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[Roger Van Duyn]

For my work, using mostly HDV material, often multi-cam, I've gotten by okay without RAID. The regular 7200 rpm SATA II drives have been more than adequate for me, even on my I-7 920 system I bought back in 2009.

One thing I DO LIKE very much are the two removable hard drive bays I have. That way I can keep separate client's work on separate Avid Media Drives.

A couple of Christmases ago 1 TB drives were on sale at a local store and I bought all of them that they had in stock.

I also have my System Drive in one of the caddy slots. It makes it easy to test out new configurations that way.

Sort of off topic, but since you're planning on a PC system, just in case you haven't heard about it, there's a program called MDV ( Media Database Viewer for Avid systems) written by a Russian programmer that greatly helps Avid Media Management.

[Scott James Walter]

Hi Jody,

I am not an avid avid user (hehe), but I do know a little bit about I/O and how to optimize performance, so I thought I'd leave a comment.

1. RAIDing SSDs for striping (RAID 0) has very little real-world benefit. So save yourself a few dollars, and don't buy that second SSD.
source: RAID 0: Great For Benchmarks, Not So Much In The Real World - One SSD Vs. Two In RAID: Which Is Better?

2. Using a separate drive for scratch discs is a good idea because it limits the amount of fetches to a single drive and thus a single bus. If you have multiple peripherals working in parallel as opposed to one drive working multiple functions serially, you'll have better performance in your editor. This goes for any NLE.

3. Finally, you'll see this all over storage forums and the like: RAID is NOT a solution for backing up data. You should always be backing up your data to an external USB aside from your RAID cluster or to the cloud, whichever is your preference.

EDIT: Woah, I'm about 2 months too late, haha.