There have been many questions about how to set up your disks.
Where do I put my media cache files, where the page file, and what about my preview files?
All these allocations can be set in PR, so I made this overview to help you find some settings that may be beneficial. It is not a law to do it like this, it is a generic approach that would suit many users, but depending on source material, workflow and backup possibilities, it is not unthinkable you need to deviate from this approach in your individual case.
The reasoning behind this overview is that you want to distibute disk access across as many disks as possible and get the best performance.
Look for yourself:
I hope this helps to remove doubts you may have had about your setup or to find a setup that improves performance.
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There's a lot wrong with that, like for example if someone has a board with only SATA II connectors, they all share the same controller and approx 300MB/s of effective bandwidth. So your chart goes out the window. Other than that, your chart states "With proper backups, D: or E: and F: can be run in RAID0."
Okay, you need to go back to basic RAID training to see why that's nonsense. Let's say it's 2x1TB drives. Half the data does on each drive so you get around 2x the speed. Hurray, except if either one of those drives failes, 100% of your data is gone, thus your suggestion for backups.
So your solution is to...what, buy an external 2TB backup drive, run backups manually occassionally? I have an idea! Run a mirrored striped pair instead with 2 more 1TB drives, right? WRONG. RAID5 is the way to go. 2 or more data drives, 1 parity drive. If Drive A fails, B and C can rebuild the data. If B fails, A and C can rebuild the data. If 2 fails at the exact same time, you're really unlucky 
The RAID5 speeds vary A LOT with drives and controllers but it's usually just under 2x the overall throughput speed. So you're safer and it cost less. Tada.
Oh but by the way, that entire chart is also complete nonsense considering every single option there would be cheaper and run as fast or faster with a high performance SSD as a temp/cache drive for basically anything. A Patriot Pyro, Intel Maplecrest 330, or Kingston HyperX can all read at 500MB/s+ and write respectably fast too. It'd take a bare minimum or 4 striped 7200RPM drives to match that read speed alone. A single SSD can beat an entire RAID array easily, almost regardless of what's contained in it and if it can't, that's because the array cost 5x more
VHC-CO-IT wrote:
Oh but by the way, that entire chart is also complete nonsense considering every single option there would be cheaper and run as fast or faster with a high performance SSD as a temp/cache drive for basically anything. A Patriot Pyro, Intel Maplecrest 330, or Kingston HyperX can all read at 500MB/s+ and write respectably fast too. It'd take a bare minimum or 4 striped 7200RPM drives to match that read speed alone. A single SSD can beat an entire RAID array easily, almost regardless of what's contained in it and if it can't, that's because the array cost 5x more
Until your write performance drops to nothing very quickly
Unfortunately Crucial doesn't cover "natural" performance issues on their SSDs. Crucial M4 drives (which I assume it is) are sort of weird. First of all, they all have REALLY bad write speeds. It's like 5:1 read to write but it's not a perfectly even comparison. They claim for their newest of the new M4 drives that "No matter what kind of files you’re working with on a Crucial SSD, you’ll experience high speeds with no drop in performance" but they don't explain why so I have to assume they're only talking about TRIM. If you have Windows 7 and a board that supports TRIM, you're good. Otherwise your performance probably will drop unless there's a "firmware-based garbage collection" in that drive. I don't think Crucial has that though on any drive.
They go on to say they tested their speed numbers with non-compressed data, which doesn't really affect performance over time. It does mean it's a lot faster though! But at like 110MB/s max write speed, I think what they mean is that they just don't bother to compress anything ever so compress-friendly and non-compress-friendly data both run slow instead of compressable data running faster, lol. At least they didn't fake the ratings by using artificially compress-friendly data
Everyone is confusing Green drives and Intellipower drives which have a green label but are COMPLETELY different. You stated your are green so yeah, they suck. But, if you're looking for a new drive, intellipower are not the same way. Turning a spinning hard drive off is a motherboard and Windows 7 coordinated feature for all hard drives, not how the Intellipower drives work. Green drives would turn themselves off in Windows XP on any motherboard as a firmware feature. Intellipower doesn't do that. Read anything anywhere about that technology like on WD's site or wikipedia or tomshardware. The (modern ones) spin down to 5900 RPM when not in use and 7200 when in use with a very fast reaction time between those. I clocked them around 120-130MB/s so yeah, they do go 7200 when in use. In fact, I was curious so I ran one outside of a PC and you can hear and feel it change speeds. Don't confuse intellipower with WD Green drives. Those just spin at a lower RPM and stay there.
Don't believe me though; believe WD's own spec sheet for one of their intellipower drives (with some bold added )
Buffer Size: 32 MB
Capacity: 1 TB
Compliant Standards: S.M.A.R.T.
Data Transfer Rate: 300 MBps
Features: IntelliPark, IntelliPower --> (5400-7200) <--, IntelliSeek,
Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), StableTrac
Form Factor: 3.5" x 1/3H
Form Factor (Short): 3.5"
Hard Drive Type: Internal hard drive
Interface: Serial ATA-300
Interface Type: Serial ATA-300
Non-Recoverable Errors: 1 per 10^15
Spindle Speed: --> ***7200 rpm*** <--
Start Stop Cycles: 300,000
Glad I could clear up that bit of bad information but unfortunately the summar is your green drives aren't very good, lol They make nice bulk storage drives because lower heat means a lower failure chance and once a file is loaded, it typically uses the cache drives for most operations so if you can tolerate a slow initial load of a video file into the program, you won't have to worry about it after that. I'm not sure how it necessarily handled ridiculously enormous files like several gigabytes though. It may not cache them, it may actually read from the original in that case. Either way, it's not like the Green drives are unuseable. They're still roughly the speed of a typical laptop drive so hey, why buy new ones?
Anyway, as for the raptors, I've never seen even a 15000 RPM drive run past 200MB/s alone and most good SSDs are at 550MB/s read. Then consider that Raptors are expensive, loud, run extremely hot, have generally bad reviews, and have high failure rates and I'm not a real big fan of them. They do have storage capacity going for them and in RAIDs, they're faster but cheaper than a higher count of slower drives so that's the basis for their price point but I still think they have an unacceptable failure rate. I think you mentioned putting two velociraptors in a RAID in which either one can fail and you're screwed, doubling your chance of data loss. That's not a great idea. We run 10k RPM HP SCSI drives in our 4 kinda sorta old servers at work and we've had 4 fail out of 20-ish in 3 years so far so don't think it doesn't happen.
If you're willing to put up with some firmware flashing headaches for a couple minutes, the new OCZ Vertex 4 is amazing. 3 and under series are baaaaaad but 4 uses a new controller and better flash chips and they actually work. I don't usually forgive companies for releasing 3 bad product lines in a row but the 4 series really are that good for the price. You can get a 128GB for about $115, 256GB for around $190, and 512GB for around $330. That's not bad and price vs performance is there. Price per GB vs speed may also result in a better overall setup. So I'd go for a single high speed, high capacity SSD instead of velociraptors.
The first time you write to a flash memory location in an SSD, it goes fast. The 2nd time, it has to erase what used to be there then write the data which takes at least 2x longer so you go from like 500MB/s write to 250MB/s write. If your operating system (win7 only I think) and motherboard (chipsets that start with a Z primarily) then you can use TRIM which immediately queues up a "zero out" command. Because of this performance degradation, a couple manufacturers implemented firmware-based "garbage collection." That means whenever the drive is sitting idle, it will go through its recently deleted locations and erase them. That way the next time you need them, they're still writing at full speed. Check out this page to see what I mean:
http://www.ocztechnology.com/aboutocz/news/151
I know Crucial's M4 drives also do it, as stated by themselves:
"Since not all operating systems support TRIM, Crucial SSDs have a special feature called Active Garbage Collection. Active Garbage Collection is a process that helps an SSD maintain optimal performance by freeing up memory sectors that are no longer in use. Garbage collection is part of the SSD itself and thus not dependent on your computer’s operating system. Since garbage collection is part of the SSD’s firmware, it works regardless of which operating and filing systems your computer is using."
Btw, OCZ's 1-3 products SUCK!!!!!!!! Their 4's are nice though. They bought out Indillinx to use their new Everest controller and now developed a new 2.0 Everest controller for their new drives. It basically builds a RAID array inside the flash chip array inside the drive so if one fails, it can warn you but not destroy your data. They're also REALLY fast and use low voltage rewrites so you get like 9000+ write cycles instead of 4000-ish from other brands.
For the velociraptor, there's good news and bad new. The good news is, it's the #1 fastest on the average read speed chart:
The bad news is, it got a score of 164MB/s and that's the 1TB version. The 300GB version got a score of 103 MB/s That officially makes it slower than my 7200RPM Seagate lol. In fact, I think one of those drives listed above it is my Seagate lol.
SSDs only had a 2011 chart but take a look. The story is a bit different with SSDS.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/ssd-charts-2011/AS-SSD-Sequential-Read,2782.html
One of the old Crucial M4 drives got a 472 MB/s score! So unless you want to get 4 velociraptors and put them in a 100% striped RAID, I don't think you're going to get near that performance level.
I noticed the prices went WAY down on 10k RPM drives in general, which is nice, but you're not going to beat their newest of the new 64GB M4 drive as a cache for premiere for a whopping $66
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148441
The 772 reviews it got seem to indicate it's REALLY good lol. Do note that the write speeds on all M4 drives kinda suck though (500MB/s read, 95MB/s write) so that's not the best example but these are much nicer:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227801
and this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167120
is the one I put in my "how fast is an SSD" demo system in my shop. It can write at 450MB/s and I verified speeds close to that with an actual benchmark test. I'm not sure about firmware garbage collection but I don't think it has it since it's the older Sandforce controller.
I've put a couple of the 128GB versions of these in laptops in place of failed hard drives and they've worked very nicely.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227810
At double the speed of a raptor for $70, it's the perfect cache drive without breaking the bank. Just remember to flash to the latest firmware with OCZ's utility or it totally freaks out lol.
It been my experience that Premiere doesn't typically use (concurrently) more space for cache files than all the source files added together but depending on rendering quality, it could. If it does, it sort of indicates that you're taking a low quality video and upscaling it except that some things in premiere are held unencoded or purposely temporarily at a higher resolution, which is enormous regardless. I just don't see it getting into the 60GB range for normal operations but if you're editing an entire HD Dateline NBC news report, I could see that The 128GB models are much cheaper than 2x the price of the 64GB ones though so it might be worth it. Plus, double the space to wear out by repetetive writes so double the useable life 
Bad news though! All the modern desktop chipsets only allow for 2 SATA III connectors and they're on 1 controller (the chipset contains the controller). The absolute maximum bandwidth available on a SATA III controller is 600MB/s. That means if you're attempting to read from your main SSD while writing to the other SSD and they're on SATA III ports 1 and 2, it's going to run out of bandwidth and slow down to a maximum total of 600-ish. I would assume it'd split it approximately 50-50 as well. I'm fairly certain it's not 600MB read and 600MB write either. I think it's grand total.
You can buy a 2nd separate PCI-E-based SATA III controller for the 2nd drive but I've heard they're almost all super glitchy and fail a lot. Check out these rave reviews lol
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124044
The 3rd party makers of them aren't exactly known for quality so really only Intel's original one works the best. While it's not amazingly common to use both SSDs at full speed at the same time, it can certainly happen while editing a video project. The good news is, you could just buy a slower SSD for cheaper and run it on the SATA II controller that's also on the board.
Check out this SSD:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227807
It's 128GB, a mere $99, I've used it in 5 builds without problems (after flashing the firmware, otherwise PROBLEMS! lol) and it only runs at about 420 read, 300MB/s write. A SATA II controller runs at 300MB/s tops so you wouldn't really lose much there. Some SSDs actually state what their speeds are if ran on a SATA II controller too so you can see how much you're losing.
Btw, I noticed modern corsair drives claim to have "Advanced Background Garbage Collection for consistent performance." That sounds firmware based unless they're just referring to TRIM.
P.S. it's worth mentioning that I'm not 100% sure if an H67 or 77 chipset for example uses a dedicated, separate SATA II controller and SATA III controller so using the III one may affect bandwidth on the II one. Anyone know for sure?
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