Mixing SATA and IDE

Hi Koga

RAID0 offers no performance boost for booting or loading apps, there are too many small files being loaded. It also has the risk factor that if one drive fails, you lose the caboosh.

For editing and transcoding, where large sequential video files are being manipulated, then RAID0 makes sense. Ditto when transcoding. Although the transcode process itself (if the software/CPU working on converting from say, a frame from mpg/avi to a dvd-mpeg frame) can be a "bottleneck", it doesn't hurt to have a fast disk subsystem. And when writing out VOBS, a fast disk subsystem really helps.

Some examples. My PIII can write out VOBS faster than my P4. It takes upto 45mins to write them out on the P4 (Asus P4P800, 3GHz w HT, 1GB RAM, 160GB PATA drives), compared to 4mins on the P3 (Tyan Thunder 2500, dual PIII 1GHz, u160 disk subsystem on seperate channels). Having the fastest disk setup for reading and writing really helps with video, and thats where RAID0 has its place. And as such work is generally written to optical media, ie DVD, there is normally not a requirement to permanently store on disk, so the risk inhernet with RAID0 is mitigated.

Putting swap files on different disks merely reduces the bandwidth fight between windows and apps vying for hard disk usage. Putting on an entirely seperate channel helps even more.

Simply put, a single Raptor or a 15K SCSI boot disk, say 36 or 73GB (depending on app requirements) makes for the fastes boot system. Stick the swap drive on another disk, or partition, on another channel.

Put video data on a RAID0 array on another channel. (You could put apps on yet another disk, but thats going for every last possible bit of speed, and suffers from diminishing returns in that the performance boost is not really worth the invetsment required at all).

Thanks. I have two 36 Gb Raptors and an IDE 250 GB. If I don't use RAID, is the best configuration for video encoding to put bootup and apps on one Raptor (and use it for the swap file), have the other Raptor for the source (read) and use the IDE for the finished video (write)? I guess this depends it it is better to use a faster hardrive to read from or to write to.

ideally, stick the swap on a fourth drive, but it wont really hurt being on the same as boot and apps (unless you have little RAM and tend to minimise applications, so dont minimise apps!). If your source video files are, erm, shall we say about 700mb-1.4gb .avi/.mpg, and you are transcoding to DVD, then yes, use the small drive for source and the large drive for dvd-mpg output.

Try to leave about 5GB of contiguous space free on the source drive, so when you convert authored DVD and dvd-mpeg to VOBs, you write the VOBS to a different drive (ie back to the Raptor). Of course, if you are using a 1-click "solution" such as divx2dvd or winavi then this is immaterial, as you just use the raptor for source and the PATA for output, but such programs produce inferior output anyway.

if you are capturing video from say DV, then ideally use the raptor, but bear in mind a full hour of high-quality, uncompressed DV can take up 100GB of drive space.

The optimal setup really depends on what you are doing,but I think you've got the general idea.

Thank you, much appreciated.

Guess I have to change my signature now with this new configuration!