Hi I love to do a lot of video editing and audio editing.I use great programs but most times whether I am doing video or audio editing the file needs to load.And it gets a little boring sometimes waiting for the file to load up and after it still needs to encode and all that.Could you guys please tell me what I would need to get to decrease load times in both read and write instances?Do i need a fast and overclocked cpu?Do i need fast memory chips?Will a hardrive setup in raid 0 better known as stripping make a difference?I am planning on building a custom computer system just for audio and video editing only...Could u guys let me know what I need to get so I can have some fun...
How to achieve super fast load times?
- Thread starter platinumsteel
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- Sep 28, 2005
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Ummmm...
QuadCore is a definite go. Make sure you pick out a really stable board. Last thing you want is errors during a encode.
Lots and Lots of Ram. Try to max that out.
Dont cheap your raid array. Meaning dont stop at 2. Get 6, to max out your sata and run opticals via ide. If your budget is large, id go SAS. OR if its super large, id RAID SSD drives
Also i hope you have a backup NAS. When Raid fails, you loose all data.
For gfx card, what type of video editting? like pinicle? Because i dont think you need a gamer card at all.
Ok guys thanks a million but I don't quite understand what the abbreviations are 15k (SCSI) and SSD..Could you guys please be specific?I am not to familiar with hardrives...But I will surely take your suggestions....
SpeedEng66
Diamond Member
- Jul 10, 2002
- 4,501
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15k = speed 15000 rpm's
(most ide/sata is 5400/7200/10000 rpm speed)
scsi = Small Computer System Interface (normal mother boards dont have this so you would need a scsi card to hook up these typs of hd's)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI
ssd = Solid-state drive
example http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3133&p=1
(most ide/sata is 5400/7200/10000 rpm speed)
scsi = Small Computer System Interface (normal mother boards dont have this so you would need a scsi card to hook up these typs of hd's)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI
ssd = Solid-state drive
example http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3133&p=1
Look for a workstation board, not a desktop board. It will have the options on it for work like this. More SATA, built in Hardware Raid, even some with scsi setups. Also some might have more memroy specs.
Mainly you need a RAID of fairly fast drives.
Something like 4 * 320GB 7200.10 type SEAGATE SATA drives in a RAID-5
array would be decently fast and not too expensive.
You should get a fair bit in EXCESS of 53 MBy / second sustained READ performance from
such a setup if I am recalling correctly what my own array (with slower discs
and no real optimization for video use striping) yields.
If you need more total storage, of course increase the number of drives and/or their
capacities (to 500GB / drive or whatever) as needed.
You could get similar or better speed benefit from a striped raid-0 of course, but
since you're probably primarily talking about READ times, a RAID-5 setup with
proper striping will give you most of the benefit of RAID-0 striping for reading, as
well as redundancy and increased storage space as well.
Get a Q9450 CPU (or a Q6600 if you have to get one before March) quad core CPU
if you want to have faster computational processing of the video, but it will not improve
load times from disk.
Get 8GB DDR2 PC2-6400 RAM at 5-5-5-15 timings if you want to be able to fit
more video in memory at once and thus spend less time PAGING the video in and out
to disc drive WHILE you work on it (if that is happening now with less memory and with
big enough video file sizes to overflow your RAM).
If you just did RAID-0 striping with 4-5 7200.10 SATA drives you could probably get
into the 100MBy / second performance range pretty easily for sustained READ operations.
Of course you could get a fair bit higher than that with several drives, but you should
start to look at the number of and performance of your SATA controllers and other
such factors before you try to design something that'd give you several times
that performance level with commodity hardware. You'd want to start to look at
server class cases, power supplies, motherboards if you want to exceed 4-6 SATA
drives in a RAID-0 mirror (or RAID-5 for that matter).
SAMSUNG has some pretty fast SATA drives these days too IIRC.
Something like 4 * 320GB 7200.10 type SEAGATE SATA drives in a RAID-5
array would be decently fast and not too expensive.
You should get a fair bit in EXCESS of 53 MBy / second sustained READ performance from
such a setup if I am recalling correctly what my own array (with slower discs
and no real optimization for video use striping) yields.
If you need more total storage, of course increase the number of drives and/or their
capacities (to 500GB / drive or whatever) as needed.
You could get similar or better speed benefit from a striped raid-0 of course, but
since you're probably primarily talking about READ times, a RAID-5 setup with
proper striping will give you most of the benefit of RAID-0 striping for reading, as
well as redundancy and increased storage space as well.
Get a Q9450 CPU (or a Q6600 if you have to get one before March) quad core CPU
if you want to have faster computational processing of the video, but it will not improve
load times from disk.
Get 8GB DDR2 PC2-6400 RAM at 5-5-5-15 timings if you want to be able to fit
more video in memory at once and thus spend less time PAGING the video in and out
to disc drive WHILE you work on it (if that is happening now with less memory and with
big enough video file sizes to overflow your RAM).
If you just did RAID-0 striping with 4-5 7200.10 SATA drives you could probably get
into the 100MBy / second performance range pretty easily for sustained READ operations.
Of course you could get a fair bit higher than that with several drives, but you should
start to look at the number of and performance of your SATA controllers and other
such factors before you try to design something that'd give you several times
that performance level with commodity hardware. You'd want to start to look at
server class cases, power supplies, motherboards if you want to exceed 4-6 SATA
drives in a RAID-0 mirror (or RAID-5 for that matter).
SAMSUNG has some pretty fast SATA drives these days too IIRC.
Reading and writing to different drives will make a significant difference in performance. Unfortunately, not all programs allow that.
RAID doesn't help much in the video editing applications that I use.
RAID doesn't help much in the video editing applications that I use.
OK thanks again.Well what I realize from you guys is that you all mostly stressed on the Hardrives and Raid 0 setups.So I think I would get what I can afford and that would be 1 pair of Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS 750GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM connect it in a raid 0 setup and see how that works out....then later on I would get another pair....and hope I can reach close too 100mby.......But I was thinking if I buy a large external hardrive for storage and I buy one of those SSD or solid state drive for performance will I still achieve fast read and write times?Or will I still be better off settling for the raid 0 setup....
I do a lot of vid encoding and learned that separate hdds was the way to go. I tried raid but didn't like the issues with reliability and found that it really wasn't necessary. I use 3 drives: One for the OS, one as my raw video source for things like vobs and one hdd where the encoded vid goes to. I have the 750GB hdd you mentioned above and it is great so two of these should work excellently. BTW, you don't mention your PCs stats so could you post that as well as what programs you use to encode?
Yes perdomot your setup sounds interesting....Well I am planning on a custom built system,so far I have one of the core 2 duos e6600 asus striker mobo Corsair 2GB PC8500 1066Mhz 240-Pin DDR2 RAM and planning on purchase a evga 8800gts nvidia card very soon haven't choosen any hardrives yet....And the programs I use and feel comfortable with are for audio editing Adobe Audition 3.0 and video editing nero recode nero vision....But is your setup a raid 0 with 3 drives?Or are they seperate.
If you're going RAID a SAS controller is basicly a must if you want any kind of decent performance. Do NOT use onboard raid if performance is of a higher priority than redundance.
For people recomending SCSI drives, while it is a good choise. Remember that SCSI is on its way beeing phased out by SAS. Basicly SAS is a Serialized SCSI. Most SAS controller also allows you to use SATA discs on them, sometimes with the help of an interposer card, other times not.
If you choose to go with a SAS controller, do not go for the cheapest ones. I've had fairly good experience with LSI controllers, Adaptecs are kind of nice too but i prefer the LSI ones as the controller logs are fairly easy to interpret.
I would defintely recomending going for some kind of redundance, for example a RAID 5 array of a minimum of 3 discs, maybe with a 4th as a hotspare if you need an extra safety net. However if more performance is needed you could go with a RAID 0 solution. You can do a RAID 0 with more than two drives. However, if one drive fails, you're screwed.
Buy a large external HDD that you do nightly backups on, do not keep the HDD connected to the system. Just plug it in, do the backup, let it be until the next time you backup. Remember, RAID is not considered backup. Its purely a redundancy solution.
These are my 2 cents, do what you like with them
EDIT:
Another way to do it is to purchase a DAS box, fill it with discs and purchase a SAS RAID controlelr with an external interface. That way you do not have to replace /change/m,ake room for internal drives.
For people recomending SCSI drives, while it is a good choise. Remember that SCSI is on its way beeing phased out by SAS. Basicly SAS is a Serialized SCSI. Most SAS controller also allows you to use SATA discs on them, sometimes with the help of an interposer card, other times not.
If you choose to go with a SAS controller, do not go for the cheapest ones. I've had fairly good experience with LSI controllers, Adaptecs are kind of nice too but i prefer the LSI ones as the controller logs are fairly easy to interpret.
I would defintely recomending going for some kind of redundance, for example a RAID 5 array of a minimum of 3 discs, maybe with a 4th as a hotspare if you need an extra safety net. However if more performance is needed you could go with a RAID 0 solution. You can do a RAID 0 with more than two drives. However, if one drive fails, you're screwed.
Buy a large external HDD that you do nightly backups on, do not keep the HDD connected to the system. Just plug it in, do the backup, let it be until the next time you backup. Remember, RAID is not considered backup. Its purely a redundancy solution.
These are my 2 cents, do what you like with them
EDIT:
Another way to do it is to purchase a DAS box, fill it with discs and purchase a SAS RAID controlelr with an external interface. That way you do not have to replace /change/m,ake room for internal drives.
Ok can you recommend a good LSI SAS raid controller and a link to find it?I think I will be going with a Raid 0 with more than 2 drives with a lsi sas controller as yanagi suggested......Oh and redundancy is not an issue for me ......it isn't a problem to backup my files...I want as much performance as possible....And could anyone explain what are the differences or advantages and disadvantages between onboard raid 0 and sas controllers?
The SSD drives improve access times, but they are not better than [good] traditional drives in terms of read/write throughput.
Rather than the WD7500AAKS, I would look at the new WD6400AAKS. This is based on two 320Gb platters and offers superior read/write throughput compared to the older WD7500AAKS. The WD6400AAKS should be widely available in a few weeks. I understand that Anand has a review in the works for these new 320Gb platter drives.
Perdot has the right idea. Reading the raw video source from one drive and encoding to a second drive improved performance by 30-40% over RAID0 for me. Although I have not tried $$$ industrial RAID controllers in my PC, RAID with Intel and nVidia chipsets does little to improve real world performance in my experience.
The 10,00 RPM 150GB 16MB Raptors are a lot faster than the 7,200 RPM drives you guys are recomending.
You could do 4 Raptors in RAID 0 fairly inexpensively.
You could do 4 Raptors in RAID 0 fairly inexpensively.
Well thanks again Amaroque...Well now I am a lil confused...I have got techs saying that sas controllers,raid 0 with more than 3 drives...Oh man i don't know who to believe.Are there anyone here who have experience with almost all the suggestions given?Maybe they will be able to tell me whats best....But common sense is telling me that according too Perdot and KenAF Reading the raw video source from one drive and encoding to a second drive improves performance over raid 0..thats sounds more logical to believe may be the best option.......But could anyone link me up with the SAS controllers that support both SAS and SATA?I would really like to check them out.....Meanwhile I am going to price up how much 4 raptors will cost....
Raid 0 6 Samsung spinpoint F1's via SATA II. Load it with 8 gb of pc2-8500 or 6400 CAS 4 ram & a good quad core.
Well budget for me isn't a problem...I just need to know whats the best setup I can get.I am investing anyway into something so budget won't be an issue for me..I just want to know what is the fastest performance.Oh and I am not really interested in the SSD too much.I would just like to know which is faster the SAS controller setups or onboard raid 0....and why SAS or SCSI controllers are better than onboard raid 0 setups......thanks.....
Exactly, all of the suggestions in this thread have been fairly good. We need some price points to deal with to make a better recomendation however. BTW: there is a fairly recent post on SR concerning the exact thing you are asking.
1) Absolutely go quad core. I think we all agree on that.
2) There are so many different options to go with (with regards to storage performance), that's why we need some price points to work with.
One more thing, when you say that budget isn't an issue... Are you talking about $20,000 or $1,000? I think that is what everyone is asking because that answer will make a HUGE difference in the respective answers you get.
well if budget isn't an issue my recommendation would be to go with a nice SAS raid card with 2 Raid0 or Raid5 arrays, one for source, one for destination.
- Sep 28, 2005
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completely agree with this. This is why i made this my second choice if budget was slightly large.
Get a SAS controller like an areca SAS controller. Drop a 4 SAS drives in RAID 0.
Watch this monster fly.
But its going to be uber expensive.
SSD in RAID would still take the king in price depending on how large the SSD's were. Ive seen SSD's run near 3g's each for large capacity ones. :X
A Mesh between SAS and SATA well more like SATA and SCSI would be raptors. I have 4 of them in RAID 0 and it absolutely pulls.
But they will be slower then the 15k SAS drives. And the Areca controller will eat any ICH9R controler any day of the week.
What im gonna run on my next system:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816151008
Markfw
Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
- May 16, 2002
- 27,114
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Well, the king would be 4-8 15k SCSI drives on a caching PCI-X controller card. I had 200k sustained read/write on a little 5 disk 10k SCSI array, (U160) . A U320 PCI-X card with 4-5 15k SCSI drives should do 400-500k sustained minimum. But you need a true workstation motherbord, and $$$, like at least $2k just for the IO system.
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