Need some advice on 2K Editing PC

[Tom Lowe]

My Dell XPS 600 recently died, so Dell sent me a replacement unit -- a brand-new XPS 710. (Thank you, Michael Dell!) It's got an Intel Core 2 Duo 6700 @ 2.66GHz, a 768MB NVidia 8800GTX video card, and 4GBs of RAM. It seems much more powerful than my old XPS 600, which only had a Pentium D chip.

The 710 came with only 320GBs of RAID0, though (two 160s). My old sysem had 500GBs of RAID, and even that wasn't enough. I was constantly having to move video projects onto external drives.

The big difference for me is that I am planning to move from editing 720p video to full-res 2K, with Cineform's Prospect HD 2K (using Premiere Pro CS3). This will be timelapse footage acquired at about 3.5K on my DLSR, then downsampled (and in some cases cropped or reframed) to Cineform 2K.

Question: How can I add more internal harddrive storage and how can I set this PC up for maximum performance in editing Cineform 2K? Since I already have 320GBs of RAID as my main "drive", should I use that for my editing timelines, or maybe add a large 10,000 RPM drive? Can I have two RAID "drives"?

Right now, I only have one monitor, which is my 24" Dell. Should I get a second monitor? My video card seems to have 2 DVI outs.

Thanks

[laguun]

Question: How can I add more internal harddrive storage and how can I set this PC up for maximum performance in editing Cineform 2K? Since I already have 320GBs of RAID as my main "drive", should I use that for my editing timelines, or maybe add a large 10,000 RPM drive? Can I have two RAID "drives"?

yes, you cn have several raids in one system.
having an additional raid of >=2 drives will increase speed, as the first raid serves the software (load, parameters etc), audio and swapfile, and the second raid would be fully avaiable for video transfer.



Right now, I only have one monitor, which is my 24" Dell. Should I get a second monitor? My video card seems to have 2 DVI outs.
Thanks
for editing/vfx/animation/compositing/di you can never have enough monitors :)
2 monitors are for most people an excellent addition, on our systems here we have dualmonitors on all nles. typically left screen bins, fx editor or additional tool, right screen viewers and timelines.

[David Newman]

I'm not sure a RAID 0 for system makes a huge amount of sense, yes more speed, but you are doubling the risk on a disk failure that will take out your whole PC. I would use CasperXP (or similar) to move you system to a single 200GB drive and boot from that. Remove the two 160G drives (use them to backup your system drive occasionally *) and put in two 500-750GB drives as raid-0, use those for media alone. You can get decent capacity with low noise and low-ish power consumption -- we also reduces the chance of failures. Put your project data and graphics on your system drive, that way a RAID failure will not lose everything -- assuming you can re-ingest your source video. Although IT sources like RED you may what to setup RAID-5, as the is no recovery without backup.

* Cloning the system can be a huge time/life saver. This week our build system crashed, the system drive that build all of CineForm's distributions was suddenly, without any warning, no longer readable (the filesystem was blank.) Fortunately a system drive clone from six months early (using Casper XP) allowed me to swap out the main drive and get the system up and running with only a few hours update -- nothing was lost, all development licenses were still valid. A failed system drive with all your software licensed tied to it can be a nightmare, when a clone will only cost you a $50 drive.

[laguun]

I'm not sure a RAID 0 for system makes a huge amount of sense, yes more speed, but you are doubling the risk on a disk failure that will take out your whole PC.
i agree, raid 0 for media, raid 1 or 10 for metadata.

[Tom Lowe]

Haha, so I just spent like 3 hours on the phone with Dell. My plan was to follow David's advice and use one of the 160GB drives I already have in the unit for my OS, then install two new 500GB drives in RAID-0 for my HD media files.

Well, Dell says that if I change the system configuration to anything but RAID-0, it will void my 4 year warranty (of which i still have 3 years left.) I explained to them that the RAID-0 is what had led to the failure of my XPS 600 system, but logic did not win the day, and they stuck to their guns, insisting that my only option was to install two 500GB drives as RAID-0 and to run my OS from that.

So, it looks like I will be stuck running everything off 1TB of RAID-0. All I can do is back up to externals regularly, and if the system fails again, maybe they will send me a new computer next year. :)