Planning a new Win XP computer

[anon]

My granddaughter's (who lives with me) computer went belly
up. This gives me an excuse to get myself a new/fast/state
of the art computer for myself. I will build a new one for
me and give her my "not so old", P4 1.7 GHZ to her.

I do a lot of work with video, so I need a lot of storage
space. I am considering the purchase of a WD 250MB SATA for
storage and a WD Raptor 74GB 10000RPM SATA for the OS and
applications.

Is this a good choice of storage options, considering my
desire for speed and need for mass storage? Would there be
any speed advantage in getting 2 boot/app drives configured
Raid, rather the single 74GB?

I would appreciate any advice on portioning and setup of the
storage subsystem.

Thanks in advance for any advice,

Al

 

[Rod Speed]

My granddaughter's (who lives with me) computer went belly
up. This gives me an excuse to get myself a new/fast/state
of the art computer for myself. I will build a new one for
me and give her my "not so old", P4 1.7 GHZ to her.

I do a lot of work with video, so I need a lot of storage
space. I am considering the purchase of a WD 250MB
SATA for storage and a WD Raptor 74GB 10000RPM
SATA for the OS and applications.

Is this a good choice of storage options,

I think the raptors are lousy value myself.

considering my desire for speed and need for mass storage?
Would there be any speed advantage in getting 2 boot/app
drives configured Raid, rather the single 74GB?

In theory, yes. In practice there isnt much in it.

I would appreciate any advice on portioning
and setup of the storage subsystem.

I think its best to have a single partition per drive
if you are going to have more than one drive.

 

[anon]

I think the raptors are lousy value myself.

I agree about the high price, although the 74GB can be had
for $234 now. Is there an alternative drive that is as fast?

 

[Wayne Youngman]

"anon" wrote

I do a lot of work with video, so I need a lot of storage
space. I am considering the purchase of a WD 250MB SATA for
storage and a WD Raptor 74GB 10000RPM SATA for the OS and
applications.

Is this a good choice of storage options, considering my
desire for speed and need for mass storage? Would there be
any speed advantage in getting 2 boot/app drives configured
Raid, rather the single 74GB?

Hi,
everyone has a mixed opinion about this, but I would like to add my
thoughts. I am a recent *convert* of SATA RAID-0. For Video Editing RAID-0
is the way to go. As far as I can see the *only* disadvantage to this
set-up is if one hard drive in the array goes *poof*. I have been using 2 x
SATA 120GBs Western-Digital disks set-up as a RAID-0 Array, and was very
impressed. After using that for a few months I sold that machine (it was
AMD) and just bought the parts for a new P4 system. In this new system I
will have 2 x 36GBWD Raptors (SATA, 10,000rpm, 8Mb cache, *5* year
warranty!) set-up as a RAID-0. This should kick butt (so to speak ). I
still haven't decided on the other disks for data storage, but the
120GB-160GB disks are the sweet spot price wise. I would need 2 storage
disks, one to hold my recordings from Digital TV (DVB-T) and the other to
hold my MP3's, DivX, Office stuff etc. . . .

People saying that Raptors are expensive hehe!, sure they cost more than
regular 7,200rpm disks, but I been buying hardware for years! I remember
paying £100.00 for my first 840MB disk, so for me £80.00 for a 36GB
10,000rpm disk is a no-brainer. However buying 2 x 74GB Raptors at their
current price does stop me cold at 10 paces . Anyway 2 x74GB RAID-0 is
much more than I need, 2x36Gb is perfect for me. I use my RAID-0 array for
root drive (windows, programs, game install, and FAST! desktop editing,
..mpg, .divx, .mp3 etc HUGE MEDIA FILES!)

Bottom line: If you want desktop RAID-0, then get some Raptors and run them
on a new INTEL motherboard. If your work involves editing 4GB video files
(or more) then you will be very happy that you got a kick-ass disk
subsystem.

Oh yeah INTEL machine have a great memory system. . . .

 

[Rod Speed]

I agree about the high price, although the 74GB can be had for $234 now.

Still lousy value in my opinion, $/GB

Is there an alternative drive that is as fast?

What matters is that there isnt a lot in it
speed wise with the best of the SATAs.

 

[anon]

How much speed advantage would there be in using 2 36GB
Raptors Raid 0, over, using a single 74GB Raptor? I plan on
using the Raptor only for the OS and Apps. The 36GB Raptors
are selling for $112.25, or $224.50 for two. The 74GB Raptor
is selling for $234.99. Almost the same cost.

I don't really think the Raptors are that expensive,
considering that speed-wise they are close to SCSI drives
that sell for much more. Isn't the Raptors the only drives
designed from the ground up as SATA drives? I heard other
SATA drives use a converter (bridge) for the SATA interface.

One bad thing about the 2 drive Raid 0 setup would be twice
the likelihood of a drive failing with 2 drives vice one. If
one drive failed in the Raid 0 setup, would all data be
lost?

Because I do a lot of work with video files, I need a lot of
data storage. I plan on getting a new 250GB (most likely
Hitachi), and installing it with an old Maxtor 160GB that I
already have. The 410GB should be sufficient for the
present, I can add 250GB (or newer larger) drives as needed.

Al

 

[David Chien]

1) Any IDE HD today will do fine for video editing. That said, the
bottle neck is usually the rendering part, so you may want to consider
hardware accellerated video boards for Premiere or Avid with Mojo box.

2) rec.video.desktop has a lot of other people who can help you here.

3) #1 said, you can easily get a screaming system that'll run rings
around most anything by going cheap & raid. eg. recent 80GB for <$40
sale at OfficeMax and so forth (see www.fatwallet.com/forums/ -> hot
deals here:
http://www.fatwallet.com/forums/mes...id=229015&highlight_key=y&keyword1=hard drive
) gets you 320GB of RAID 0 storage that'll run 4x faster than a single
HD in read/write speed, and be cheaper than a 74GB 10,000 rpm HD (and
faster).

Or, if you've got $$$, drop in 4x 250-320GB 7200RPM HDs in RAID 0
configuration, and you'll easily start topping 50MB/sec sustained
transfer rates all the time.

(eg. see benchmarks:
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20020830/ide_raid2-05.html#test_results)

Keep in mind that these are with older drives - latest drives are
even faster!

3) eg. a 4x 200GB HD deal (see fatwallet.com thread above), gets you
$160 * 4 = $640 for 800GB of storage.

eg. 4x 120GB @ $<$100 each = $400 for 480GB of storage

4) I wouldn't worry about the partitioning much beyond sticking OS on
one partition, video/data on another for easy backups. Other than that,
the old tale about multiple drives for DV captures is just bogus because
all modern 7200rpm drives in anything >2Ghz P4 will easily capture video
w/o a problem.

5) If, and only if, you're copying huge videos all day long (not just
editing, but copying), then dual (optional RAID) HD subsytems would be
nice. A HD subsystem copy to another HD subsystem is always faster than
a HD to same HD copy.

6) SATA vs. IDE - Not really a difference:
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/200311141/hd-250-08.html

I'd go with what's cheaper to buy than SATA vs. IDE here. (1-5MB/sec
difference off of 25-50MB/sec isn't going to make a big difference per
HD. vs. having 4 of them in a RAID 0 setup) (eg. Western Digital IDE
vs. SATA benchmark scores are practically identical on this test)

Plus, for fast backups, emergency recovery, etc. almost no machines have
SATA today vs. everything has IDE. Thus, if you're wanting to pull a HD
for data backup, transport, etc., you're better off with IDE today and
for the next couple of years. You'll be stuck if you try to hook up a
SATA HD to almost any PC you'll find today.

7) May want to look at XPCs: forums.sudhian.com -> Shuttle XPC and
http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20020815/index.html
http://us.shuttle.com/

Nothing like having a 3.4Ghz P4, 300GB video editing lunchbox with
8x DVD burner, ATI AIW TV tuner card, that'll fit under your arm.

Very stable, works great, and fun!

(some wacky mod dropped in 4 2.5" IDE HDs RAID'd into one of them,
too...)

8) Drop one of these 5 1/4" LCD panels into any PC, and voila! instant
all-in-one PC + video monitor
http://www.logitec.co.jp/products/monitor/lcmt042a.html

 

[Neil Maxwell]

I would appreciate any advice on portioning and setup of the
storage subsystem.

If you plan on backing up your partitions/drives, this can affect your
partitioning approach. I have multiple partitions on my primary
drive, a large archive drive, and a firewire drive for backups.

I use True Image to image my 2 most critical partitions (boot/apps and
docs), ignore my games partition, and selectively back up my archive
drive with Second Copy. The archive drive has lots of large files,
temporary video files, and such that I don't care much about, and is
too big to image on my existing setup without eating up the space.

All of this runs automatically in the background. This gives me
decent security for all my important stuff without needing 400G of
backup space.


Neil Maxwell - I don't speak for my employer