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Participating Frequently
December 30, 2017
Question

Need advice on PP CC 2018 optimal multiple hard drive configuration

  • December 30, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 1595 views

Hi Everyone.

I'm sure this topic gets beat to death so I apologize in advance for re-hashing this stuff but I'm just looking for a little guidance here.

My goal is to decrease export times and increase general performance in read/writes across multiple drives.  From the little bit of reading I've done here I'm starting to realize that premiere might just be one of the most complicated programs I've had to deal with to get 'right' in terms of utilizing  multiple hard drives to increase performance.

Please understand we are on a budget.   For now I will say that we are stuck with the hardware we have unless the financial situation changes at which point I can build a dedicated editing computer.   Until then......

Processor: Intel i7 920 2.4GHZ 4 core.

mobo:          MSI  X58-M 

The north bridge of the chipset is running an Intel ICH10 controller for the drives.

Ram : 6 banks which hold 3 dimms of 2GB 1333mhz and 3 dimms of 4GB 1333mhz modules all running in triple channel mode totaling 18GB. The memory is actually only running at 1066mhz which I understand is result of the CPU.   I have some tweaking to do here in terms of the memory clocking and processor clocking.  I'm going to attempt an overclock of both but that's digressing from the topic at hand here.

Video card is an MSI Radeon RX 580 GAMING X 8GB TwinFrozr VI

Raidmax Vampire 1000W 80+Gold powersupply. Dual 12V rails

NOW.... the hard drives:

1)     The OS, ProgramFiles, SWAP is sitting on a new 525GB SSD - Crucial MX300 SATA III.    3D NAND  530MB/s sequential Reads and 510MB/s sequential writes. Dynamic Write Acceleration

2)     1 empty 110GB OCZ Revo Drive X2 - For those unfamiliar...  This is a dual 55GB SSD RAID 0 configuration. It's essentially 2 SSD's on their own PCIe card that DO NOT connect to the ICH10 on the north bridge.  They sit on their own controller which is sitting in the the mobo's secondary PCIe 2.0 x16 slot.

3)      1  Intel X25 180GB SSD.  -   I got this on sale and I was pretty disappointed.  It has TERRIBLE small read write access and stutters on small files but is fine on larger files.   I'm not thrilled about this drive so my feelings wouldn't be hurt if you guys told me to ditch it for my setup.  This is currently holding "in progress" Premiere project files. So all the source files we are using for our projects. 

4)      1  x Western Digital BLACK 2TB drive holding our important stored files, family pictures, documents etc.  We'll call this our storage drive unrelated to premiere projects

5)      1 x Western Digital BLACK 2TB    - sitting on my desk not currently installed.

6)      1 x Seagate 2TB - in a toaster drive dock that isn't normally connected.  I sync our storage drive to every week as a backup drive to backup data from Drive 4 (Storage drive).

7)     2 x Western Digital BLACK 2TB in a RAID 1 configuration to store Finished Premiere Projects.

So..........

We are attempting to create short 4K videos, with run times between 5 and 15 minutes on average, for a YouTube channel.   We are using Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2018.

Premiere was installed by my wife presumably with installation defaults.  It was installed to the C: drive/ProgramFiles folder.   Nothing has been changed yet in terms of preferences for Premiere.

Drive 1 needs to remain the OS drive.   The Revo drive WAS the OS drive until yesterday, but it was too small and we were running out of space constantly so I cloned it to the new Crucial.  

So what would you guys suggest I do with the rest of the drives for optimal performance?

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    1 reply

    Participating Frequently
    December 30, 2017

    Also, I am running Windows 10 64

    It might also be worth noting that the Revo drive Raid 0 can be run as either a Raid 1 or non-raid.  Running in non raid would result in 2 standalone 55GB SSDs on a their own controller separate from the ICH10.

    Bill Gehrke
    Inspiring
    December 30, 2017

    My systems do not used hard disk drives for any Premiere Pro editing functions.  They are fine for backup and archiving. 

    Participating Frequently
    December 30, 2017

    Ya.  Maybe I'm over complicating this.  That's never happened to me before (sarcasm).

    So nothing premiere related on the HDDs.

    Ok so focusing on that Intel SSD with the stuttering issues related to small read/write problems.

    Should I ditch that drive completely?

    So go with a 3 drive setup and break up the raid 0 Revo drive and configure for 2 individual 55gb drives.

    C: Crucial 525gb SSD for OS/programs/swap

    D: OCZ 55GB SSD1 media cache

    E: OCZ 55GB SSD2 output drive

    F: 2TB western digital RAID 1 for FINISHED projects

    G: 2TB RAID 1western digital  for Storage

    H: 2TB Seagate BACKUP of G: STORAGE in external drive dock

    Is that making more sense?