Input on a PC Build for Video Editing

[Trevor Dennis]

Originally Posted by Noa Put

with raid 0 you better have a backup strategy because if one drive fails all is lost.

Happened to me on a relatively new build with a pair of 1st generationn Velociraptor 300Gb drives in raid0. I use Shadow protect set to a 15 minute interval, so was able too be up and running PDQ.

I have also lost one of my external 1Tb USB3 WD My Books this year. Those are the only two drive failures since I started using computers with the BBC micro whenever that was, but the raid0 array had my most irriplaceabe work on it, so I was pretty pleased to have that back up. I also had a straight back up of that drive, but it was nearly a week old.

Tom's Hardware reported that HDD production is fully recovered from the Thailand floods a while back. I think it was Hard that said this was not being reflected with pricing, but that may have caught as well by now.

[Alan Craven]

The 750 GB drives were at a special price - no other good reason.

I am happy with the risk of data loss, provided that my raw files are still available. Previews, cache, etc. can soon be re-created.

If you are a professional, then a specialist RAID card from Areca and multi-drive RAID 3/5/10 or whatever arrays are a justifiable expense, perhaps, and for some a necessity.

[Vincent Anthony]

Thanks Fellas - yeah, I was eyeing the 750GB drives because they are at $85 each now, so 4 wouldn't be too bad, or even 5 and use one as a boot drive.

Great Idea with the shadow protect, that would be something else I might do as I do have backup software. Currently I just manually back things up. I am a pro photographer, but video is becoming a more serious hobby as time goes by.

The occasional music video, promo, or just fun experiment is all I do. I would just love some speed!

Currently I am working on an HP consumer machine with a 1TB Sata drive, 9BG RAM, and an i7 920 @2.67GHz with an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 260 Card.

The wife's computer needs replacing so I was planning to build myself a new one and set up this one for her. That's my excuse anyway... ;)

Another question about RAM. Is it better to go with 32GB RAM like this for $144 (1600) : Newegg.com - G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL10Q-32GBZL

Or with a 16 GB of higher quality RAM (2133): Newegg.com - G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000) Desktop Memory Model F3-17000CL9Q-16GBZH

[Panagiotis Raris]

Originally Posted by Alan Craven

The 750 GB drives were at a special price - no other good reason.

I am happy with the risk of data loss, provided that my raw files are still available. Previews, cache, etc. can soon be re-created.

If you are a professional, then a specialist RAID card from Areca and multi-drive RAID 3/5/10 or whatever arrays are a justifiable expense, perhaps, and for some a necessity.

agreed; two cheap HDD's and an ARECA card, or multiple cheap HDD's and a decent ARECA card outweigh the benefits of single Raptor drives, significantly.

[Vincent Anthony]

How much of a difference in speed is there when using RAID off the motherboard vs. setting up RAID off of a card?

[Harm Millaard]

Vincent,

A bit late in the game, but to start off with your last question, how much slower is an on-board raid over an identical raid with a dedicated raid controller. Not significant when you use striped or mirrored arrays, but with parity raids they can be - in normal operation - up to 40% slower than the dedicated controllers. However, if you ever need to rebuild an array, due to a disk failure, then the difference is easily 100%.

It is frowned upon to give links to other fora, but a number of your questions have already been answered in several articles on the Adobe Hardware Forum. Maybe have a look there. If you can't find the info you are looking for, you can always contact me by PM.

Also have a look at a now nearly fully documented build I just did: Intro Part 1

It is quite long, but if you take the time to read it, there may be thoughts to show other perspectives, priorities all related to a complete build.

Initial reaction to your build list:

a. Change the Fermi card to a Kepler card, like the GTX 660 Ti.
b. Change the Corsair TX (bronze) to an AX (gold) PSU.
c. Change the RipjawsX to RipjawsZ F3. The X series is only for 1155 platforms and you need 2011 platform compatible memory.
d. Consider changing the Crucial M4 to a Corsair Performance Pro or Neutron GTX, Plextor M5 Pro or Samsung 840.

There are a number of posts about these things on the hardware forum.

[Vincent Anthony]

Thanks Harm, I may PM you!

[Kyle Root]

There's a thread on here somewhere, where I went through this last November for my custom system.

The only thing I can comment on is the SSD issue. I'm very glad I went that route for my C: drive. My system boots in the 15-20 second range. Super quick!

I've never done the raid thing, but have my drives as:

C: 128 GB Crucial - Windows OS
D: 128 GB Crucial - Programs/cache/scratch

and then two 2-TB Seagate 7200 RPM 64MB Cache harddrives for data.

Those are all SATAIII (6Gbps) drives as well.

The whole system is pretty peppy!

[Tim Polster]

I would just add that one of the most used items in my computer is a "hot swap" bay. This allows me to slide hard drives in and out for quick backups. Costs $30. Anything that goes on my system to edit is first backed up and put on the shelf. So your worries about RAID will not be about failure. Let it rip with RAID 0 and always have a backup. But know going in that if you are a video editor, you will always need a lot of hard drives laying around.

But, also realize that RAID is most often not needed. The only time I see a benefit with RAID is if I am building disc images. RAID speeds up the file transfer. If you edit anything with compression you do not need a RAID. AVC-Intra is 100mbps. Tha translates to about 10 megabytes per second needed for disc throughput. A modern single SATA drive will do over 100 megabytes per second...

So do not fall into the trap of thinking video editing = RAID. It is just not true. Now if you do a multicamera edit you might want to put a camera per drive just to ease the load.

I use external drives for my source files because I have a lot of them and it lowers the heat level in the computer case. They are turned off when I am not using them. If you fill your case full of drives they will just generate heat and spin when you are not using them. Heat and spinning is what ends the life of drives.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Tim Polster

I would just add that one of the most used items in my computer is a "hot swap" bay. This allows me to slide hard drives in and out for quick backups. Costs $30. Anything that goes on my system to edit is first backed up and put on the shelf. So your worries about RAID will not be about failure. Let it rip with RAID 0 and always have a backup. But know going in that if you are a video editor, you will always need a lot of hard drives laying around.

But, also realize that RAID is most often not needed. The only time I see a benefit with RAID is if I am building disc images. RAID speeds up the file transfer. If you edit anything with compression you do not need a RAID. AVC-Intra is 100mbps. Tha translates to about 10 megabytes per second needed for disc throughput. A modern single SATA drive will do over 100 megabytes per second...

So do not fall into the trap of thinking video editing = RAID. It is just not true. Now if you do a multicamera edit you might want to put a camera per drive just to ease the load.

I use external drives for my source files because I have a lot of them and it lowers the heat level in the computer case. They are turned off when I am not using them. If you fill your case full of drives they will just generate heat and spin when you are not using them. Heat and spinning is what ends the life of drives.

Actually, with some NLE software, RAIDs are required especially for HD material because such software actually decompress compressed video material to compressed RGB and then recompress it back to the original format on the fly. And just a single track of 1080i/p uncompressed RGB video requires well over 200 MB/s (1.6 Gbps) worth of disk throughput. Unfortunately, even the fastest single HDD falls far short of this 250 MB/s (2.0 Gbps) minimum (in terms of both average and minimum physical throughput), based on known benchmark tests done by others. In fact, their maximum physical throughput falls well short of that 250 MB/s minimum. This is all because some NLEs still cannot handle native editing of compressed video, and so must decompress and recompress during editing.

[Tim Polster]

I did not know that. I am an Edius user and the only other NLE I have used is Premiere. If that is the case with other NLEs then it would save money to ditch that NLE and move to one that does not need a RAID!

[Trevor Dennis]

Tim, I built my current system after spending a lot of time on the Adobe Premiere Pro Hardware forum, but still kind of crept up on the final spec.

My system has a 3930K running at 4.4Ghz, 32Gb RAM, GTX 570. I've always used multiple drives, and when first built I had a 256Gb SSD for OS and program files, a 300Gb Velociraptor for project files, and other drives for data.

The above system still stuttered with a single track of 1080p H.264 from a DSLR. So I got a second V'raptor and raid 0'd it for the project drive, and set a couple of 1Tb WD Blacks for Exports and data. (plus lots more drives for back up and other data.

This made all the difference, and everything works smooth as silk with multiple tracks on the timeline. Incidentally, the much bigger 50Mb/s files from my XF300 seem to put far less load on the system than the DSLR files.

This sytem was rated forth fastest on Harm's PPBM5 results page for quite a long time, and is still placed 14th as I type this.

Benchmark Results

One of the V'raptors failed a while back, and I replaced drives with 2nd gen 600Gb V'raptors, which made a much faster raid 0 array. I have not tried the PPBM5 benchmark with this set up. I use Shadow Protect set at 15 minute incremental updates, and lost nothing when the drive failed. I also have four USB3 WD My Book externals (6Tb in total) and one of the 1Tb drives has also failed in the last year. That had non crucial data on it and was not backed up. The scary thing is I have no idea what I have lost on that drive, but I have not got round to making a concerted effort to recover the data.

[Tim Polster]

Sorry to hear of the data loss and the performance situation you have with Premiere. I can only comment on my experience and with Edius. I can edit DSLR footage straight from the CF card, adding filters, over USB 2.0 - with a four year old i7-920 CPU.

I guess the hardware build really needs to match the NLE. In theory, more compressed footage (DSLR footage) should stress the CPU more than the drive throughput. But it seems each software has a different way to achieve its end result.

[Mark Williams]

I am a Edius user for three years and do not have nor have needed raid. I Plays straight from the timeline without rendering out to a HDTV preview monitor. Here are my antiquated system specs.

Edius 5.5, HDSPARK output card, Asus P6T Deluxe mobo, i7-920 processor, Antec 900-2 case, Corsair 650 watt p.s., Corsair 3GB XMS3 PC3-12800 DDR3, Sapphire HD4830, WD 160GB Caviar system drive, 1TD WD Caviar Black video drive, Lite-on IHAS324, Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium, Vista 32 bit, Amtron P2 card reader, Samsung LN19A330 HDTV

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Mark Williams

I am a Edius user for three years and do not have nor have needed raid. I Plays straight from the timeline without rendering out to a HDTV preview monitor. Here are my antiquated system specs.

Edius 5.5, HDSPARK output card, Asus P6T Deluxe mobo, i7-920 processor, Antec 900-2 case, Corsair 650 watt p.s., Corsair 3GB XMS3 PC3-12800 DDR3, Sapphire HD4830, WD 160GB Caviar system drive, 1TD WD Caviar Black video drive, Lite-on IHAS324, Sound Blaster X-FI Titanium, Vista 32 bit, Amtron P2 card reader, Samsung LN19A330 HDTV

This is because Edius is optimized for such slower, lower-end hardware. It does not decompress/recompress on the fly like other NLEs. If I had Edius instead of other NLEs, I would have still been using an old Core 2 Quad PC instead of my current Sandy Bridge i7 for editing even 1080i/p AVCHD material. Unfortunately, I upgraded the hardware before I began to learn about Edius.