Which Drive for Render?

[Steve Leverich]

Sorry if this has already been covered, I tried a search on several key words and came up with zilch -

I'm running Vegas 7d/CDA on a Sony Vaio desktop, 3.6 gHz P4, 1 gig ram, 250 gig 7200RPM Sata drive for boot/programs - I've added a 76 gig 10k rpm Raptor internally, and two Maxtor 7200rpm external USB2 drives, one for storage and one for backups (the storage drive goes with me for use with laptop for away-from-home editing/capture)

I have another gig of ram to add, and will do that before I start rendering any projects. I'm using two 19" LCD's and firewire preview (Canopus TwinPact100) thru a Sony broadcast trinitron and have disabled scopes, so that part's probably as good as can be. (or is it?)

My main question - for fastest render times, which drive (raptor or external USB) should I render to?

Also, which (if any) of the various system tweaks will have the biggest effect on rendering OR smooth playback during editing?

TIA for any insights... Steve

[Glenn Chan]

1- Don't read and write to the same drive, that will slow things down. Ideally, you would read from one drive and write to another.

2- A lot of renders aren't limited by hard drive speed. It just depends where the bottleneck is... for renders that are almost like file copying, hard drive speed will be the bottleneck. For the really long renders (i.e. stuff like Magic Bullet Editor's without GPU acceleration) then the CPU will be the bottleneck.

3-

Also, which (if any) of the various system tweaks will have the biggest effect on rendering OR smooth playback during editing?

From what I've seen of Vegas benchmarks:
*Most tweaks don't make any difference at all.
*The CPU makes the biggest difference, by far.
*Making sure nothing is hindering performance makes the second biggest difference. i.e. no PIO mode, no other programs sucking CPU cycles (i.e. distributed computing apps)
*Overclocking does help, but can compromise stability. Test your system!
*Turning off the video preview window might make a difference?

*Memory bandwidth makes a small difference. Maximize this by installing RAM properly (into the right slots), and using PAIRS of IDENTICAL memory.
*Setting the vegas process to "real-time" priority makes a 1% difference.
*Hyperthreading sometimes helps or doesn't help performance; a few percent difference.

IMO, few of the tweaks are worth it.

[Steve Leverich]

Glenn, thanks for the rapid response - just barely ate my lunch and had your reply :=) Since the Raptor is essentially empty, guess I'll designate that as the "render to" drive; all files are on the external 7200 Maxtor and Vegas is on the boot drive, so it sounds like I'm pretty well set - before using Vegas for much of anything, I always give it the ole "three finger salute" and end all processes such as messenger, virus, network, etc. anyway.

Thanks also for the tip about killing the monitor, I'll definitely add that to the plan... Steve

[Glenn Chan]

Only antivirus (and distributed computing) may be worth killing. The other stuff likely has negligible CPU use.