NEW SYSTEM

[Cope This 719]

I am contemplating getting a new system and would like your thoughts on the following items.

MOTHER BOARD
Asrock Z68 Extreme 4.

RAM
Corsair Vengenance DDR 3 16GB

DRIVES
SSD Corsair Force Series 3 120GB X 2
Seagate Green HD x 2

LG BH10LS30 Blu Ray Burner

CPU
Intel Core i5 2500


Windows 7 64 bit Premium

DVD Drive
Samsung SH s222AB

Should these be arranged in a RAID CONFIGURATION.

Any input would be most welcome

Regards John

[Peru]

Will Pre El 7 run on a 64 bit system?

I tried Pre El 3.02 and it won't run properly.

[Chuck Engels]

Version 9 will run on a 64 bit system without any problems, not sure about earlier versions but I would think that 7 and 8 would also.

Should these be arranged in a RAID CONFIGURATION.

RAID configuration for the hard drives maybe, RAID 0 or RAID 1, but that is more personal preference than anything else.

[Steve Grisetti]

Is upgrading to an i7 processor at all in the budget? That would be a real investment in the future.

I also may be misreading the drive information -- but I'm very surprised to see a current computer with less than 500 gigs on a drive (with ideally at least a terrabyte on the second drive). You'll be surprised how quickly they fill up!

This isn't a laptop, is it?

[Bob]

Peru: Yes, PrE 7 runs great on Windows 7 64-bit. I have that. I also have Production Premium CS5 and that runs great also.

Steve: The Seagate green drives are over 1TB. SSD drives don't come that large yet. I agree that if John's budget could afford an I7 2600k, that would be a good step up in performance and capability over the 2500.

John:

The green drives are ok for mass storage, but if you will be using these as working drives for your video work (scratch files, cache, etc.) keep in mind that they are 5900 rpm instead of 7200 rpm as on a standard drive and have higher seek times and latency. Performance will definitely be slower. If you will be actively using those for video work, I'd stick with the 7200 rpm drives.

What drives were you thinking of using with raid? You specified 2 SSD drives, what's the second drive for? Raid 0 would not make sense for SSD drives. Raid 1 is a mirror, which would be ok -- especially if you cannot tolerate downtime while restoring, but would be expensive using SSDs. And, you need to backup anyway. For the hdd drives, Raid 0 is often used for those to improve speed which was useful with the older slower drives especially when capturing video from a tape based camcorder. But, with hard drive and solid state cameras, it's a file transfer rather than a real time capture and not as critical. If you aren't capturing, you probably won't need raid 0. Especially with the Sata 3 drives. Raid 1 is useful if you need minimal down time if a drive fails.

You didn't mention a video card. Are you intending to use the onboard video of the 2500?

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

I have been considering replacing my 150Gb 10,000rpm Raptor system disc with an SSD but based on cost per Gb for a reasonably sized one I just don't think it worthwhile going the SSD route now. Maybe in another twelve - eighteen months.....

So my suggestion would be to skip the SSDs and go with 7,200rpm 1 or 2 Gb HDDs.

Later, when SSDs are more mainsteam and cheaper you can add them then you'll have the old HDDs for additional working storeage. Cheaper option too so freeing up some budget to look at that CPU upgrade.

[Cope This 719]

Thank you everybody for all the feed back. I will go for the i7 and will change the HD to 7200 rpm. I am considering 2 Barracutta. One is the ES 2 the other is XT. Does anyone know the difference.
As far as the SSD are concerned I was thinking of putting Windows 7 System and PE 7 or PE 9 on the first SSD drive together with other programs that can use the speed. The second SSD would be used for other applications. These are the ramblings of new boy and any help is most appreciated.

Once again thank you John

[George Tyndall]

...keep in mind that they are 5900 rpm instead of 7200 rpm as on a standard drive and have higher seek times and latency. Performance will definitely be slower. If you will be actively using those for video work, I'd stick with the 7200 rpm drives.

Bob, I wondered about that when hp came out with the USB2.0 Pocket Media Drives (5200rpm) in addition to the USB2.0 Pesonal Media Drives (7200rpm)that I had been using with my xp system and which have independent power supplies.

So, before puchasing I asked hp to confirm for me that the 640GB pocket drives would in fact function for my workflow, which is to have only the OS and programs on my C drive but all my data (clips, stills, PREL files, completed MPEG2s, music, PSE catalogs, etc) on external drives. hp confirmed that they would--and they do. I sometimes have as many as six of them running at once, all powered by the motherboard. (Each has a USB cable that is only about a foot long.)

Are you surprised by this performance?

[Bob]

Are you surprised by this performance?

No. Remember, these drives have onboard cache and are buffered. That masks the slowness of the drive access. If you are reading larger sequential files, for example, where the drive controller can anticipate the next read and preload it into the cache, you may very well be able to read most of the data from the cache and not be delayed by the drive. However, if your application is I/O intensive (uncompressed video or video output as a sequence of still frames can easily qualify) or if the read/writes are short and spread over the disk so the heads have to change position frequently, the cache isn't going to help you so much. In your case, you are also spreading the load across multiple drives which also helps the drives keep up.

Use those slower drives as your boot disk where there are frequent random reads and writes and you will easily be able to tell the difference. That's why people go for things like the 10K rpm WD Velociraptors and SSD for the boot drive.

Whether the slower drives are satisfactory or not depends on how you will be using them. But, for an internal drive which will be actively used for video and not mainly archival storage, I see no reason not to get a 7200 rpm drive.

[George Tyndall]

Are you surprised by this performance?

No. ....

Yet another very informative post.

[John 'twosheds' McDonald]

As far as the SSD are concerned I was thinking of putting Windows 7 System and PE 7 or PE 9 on the first SSD drive together with other programs that can use the speed. The second SSD would be used for other applications.

Hi John. Within the last two or three weeks I did some checking up on whether to upgrade to an SSD based system volume and decided against it as not being worthwhile to me at the present time.

My personal recommendation to you would be to go with a 10,000 rpm Raptor for the opsys and programs and standard 7,200 HDDs for everything else. You can always upgrade to SSDs later. Here is an article from a UK PC mag that might be of interest:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/hard-dis ... -ssd-120gb

[kathyconnolly]

Hello. Do you mind if I jump in for advice on this question? I just got a new desktop (nothing fancy, I'm in a public school system) and want to know what I should order to enhance its performance. I told you a few weeks ago that the tech director suggested a graphics card designated for Adobe. I talked to our tech services guy, and he asked me what kind I wanted to order. Of course, I don't know!

I'm going to give you the specs of this machine, and if you could tell me the parts that would help. Don't laugh at what I have now! Your machines are so fancy.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz
RAM 4.00 GB (3.87 GB usable)
System type 64-bit Operating System

Thanks in advance. I really want to get it right this time, and I can afford to get a few additional components.

Kathy

[Steve Grisetti]

Do you want to enhance or replace the system, Kathy?

How much money do you have to spend? What kind of camcorder will your video be coming from?

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all answer for a question like this.

[Chuck Engels]

The current system is good for everything except maybe High Definition video editing.
My laptop is a Core 2 Duo 2.0ghz and does ok, but it is really slow (HDV editing that is), for standard definition it is more than enough.

There are video cards that some Adobe software will take advantage of, most are very expensive and I don't think that Premiere Elements is one of them. If you are using "on board" graphics, that is a graphics adapter that is built into the motherboard, you would gain a little by going to a dedicated 512mb - 1GB video memory graphics card.

The primary drain in video editing is the processor, so without increasing the processor speed you really can't make a huge difference in things like rendering.

[kathyconnolly]

I would like to buy an extra graphics card and/or a memory upgrade. I definitely can't buy a whole new system right now. I finally had a teacher computer installed in my office because I got frustrated with my laptop.

I've got a Canon ZR960 camera.

The graphics card that is already installed (if I'm looking at the right info) is an ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series.