Hard Drive Setup

[Tom Chase]

Quick question for everyone - How do you set your hard-drives up for working w/red files in Premiere & After Effects.

Currently I have the following setup on my Mac Pro (2010) 1-Intel SSD boot drive, an interal software RAID were I currently keep my R3D files, and I 1TB 7200 RPM interal drive which is my AE & Premiere scratch drives. BlackMagic Disk Speed Test gave me the following Results: SSD Read 130/Write 170; Software Raid 169/169; Internal 1TB Drive 70/70

I am considering buying a OWC Mercury Accelsior PCI-E SSD (thinking 480GB) - I understand that a common issue with AE is bottlenecking at HDD accessing the files. So here's my question keep the R3D files (or transcoded files) on the Software RAID or move them to the PCI-E SSD? Or just use the PCI-E SSD as a super fast disk cache?

My Whole systems is:

Mac Pro 2010
2-2.4 GHZ Quad Core
GTX780 (non-flashed)
26GB RAM (also considering jumping to at 65GB)
WD External Drives connected via Firewire & USB

Thanks

Tommmy

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

The system bus, SATA2 ports, and software raid are all bottlenecks. A system owc accelsior drive would help, as would an HBA raid controller.

 

[Tom Chase]

Update on the OWC Acccelsior - working amazingly! also the eSATA port has enabled me to concoct my REDMag Reader via eSATA. 195GBs of data moved from REDMAG to the 450GB Accelsior in 15 min same move via Firewire 800 was taking nearly 1 hour.

Very happy

Tom

 

[Alexander Mejia]

I currently operate this way in windows:

C: - OS, NLE, SWAP (7200RPM raid 1)
d: - Premiere Cache files (500MB/s SSD single drive)
F: - Projects and media files (8 drive 7200RPM Raid 5, about 500MB/s)

Never any disk IO issues this way. I also have 32gb of ram so I hardly touch the swap file.

Mac OS may treat things differently so I would ask someone who sets up macs for a living if thats what you do.