Building a Video Editing System - Storage

Since I am still researching which processor and motherboard would be best, I'm going to start with storage. Video editing systems demand fast storage and lots of it. Hard drives are an amazing value these days. I can remember when an Apple Sider 10 MB (thats not a typo thats 10 megabytes) was $500. As of this writing, you can get 500 GB SATA drives for $130.

Basically you have 3 types, PATA, SATA, and SCSI. We will be using SATA or SATA II because they are faster than PATA and a better value than SCSI. You will see specs for these drives that say 1.5 mb/s (megabytes a second) or 3.0 mb/s. These numbers don't really do us any good because these are peak speeds and they won't sustain data transfer speeds of that for long. So we can improve this with a RAID system. There are several versions but we are only concerned with RAID 0 and RAID 5 because these will improve our data, such as the video itself, access times. RAID 0 takes 2 hard drives of the same size and reads and writes to both of them at the same time. Our computer sees it as one large drive, the size of the two drives combined. We get ourselves a couple of 500 GB drives, set them up with RAID 0 and booyah, you got 1000 GB or 1 TB (Terrabyte) of fast, working space for your video editing. But there is a drawback and one I have experienced first hand. If either one of these drives fails, which they will do if not replaced first, you lose everything on both drives. Up to a whole TB of work lost, poof! Ouch! There are ways to find out when a drive is failing and replace it before it does, but in the real world, most people aren't going to know. That brings me to RAID 5. You take 5 drives of the same size and end up with 4 drives worth of space. If we take 5 250GB drives, you end up with 1000 GB or 1 TB of usable space. RAID 5 can read and write to the drives at the same time , so we get the increased speeds. It also creates what is called parity bits. This is where the extra space goes, but it's well worth it. Thanks to the parity, we can rebuild the data on a failed drive. When one of the drives dies, we replace it with a good one and the RAID 5 system rebuilds it. RAID 5 will give us the speed and peace of mind about our projects.

So we are going to use RAID 5, made up of 5, 7200 rpm, 250 GB or 500 GB, depending on the budget, SATA drives. I'm currently using the Seagate Barracuda drives. I've tried every brand under the sun and have seen them all fail. The Barracuda has a 5 year warranty while most the other manufacturers have a 3 year warranty for their drives in the price range.

For our Windows XP and Adobe CS3 drive, we will go with the Western Digital Raptor, 74 GB, 10K RPM SATA drive. It's a more pricey than the 7200 RPM drives, this 74 GB costs more than the 500 GB SATA drive. It will make a nice fast drive for windows and the video editing applications.

Building a Video Editing System

I got a client who wants me to build a new video editing system. So I'm going to go through it with you. Show you what parts I chose and why. I'm going to head over to newegg and and pick out the parts. Then I'll be back to show you what I have decided to use.

Myspace Hacks Again

I got to make this quick because it's time for me to get to work, but I felt this was important. I was on myspace and I got one of those adds that said, your computer is running slow would you like us to do a free scan for you, of course I clicked no. At that point my antivirus, NOD32 caught a java script infection. The scary thing about this was I chose NO for my answer and it still tried to install the virus. The add claimed it was from a company called spyware destructor. I'll post more details as I get them. Be careful out there