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.
425
Replies
New to all this, but I've been reading for days now. Thanks for all your help.......... One source of confusion.
Yesterday I found this here (somewhere) C: OS & Programs
D: Projects & Scratch
E: Media
Now, at the begining of this thread I see your table. Does the difference matter??
Thanks, Tom B.
Thank you, Eric, for clarifying! 
I will certainly contact 3ware/LSI and see if they can direct me in the right direction!
I contacted 3ware support and they had me update the firmware for my Seagate Constellation drives and then test the throughput using IOmeter.
These are the results I get for write throughput now: 399MB/s.
Hi Billy,
Well, you certainly have the horsepower you need, but it needs a little configuring. I shoot 5D2 footage and use Premiere Pro as well, and there are a few things to know to make this easy so it is done right the first time.
We'll discuss your Mac in a second, but first you should know that you are going to need to pull off every trick in the book to get the footage to edit smoothly. You may know a lot of this, I'm just including it so it's all in one basket (and to benefit another reader possibly). The H.264 QT format that comes out of the 5D Mark II and 7D is a good compressed format for finished video, but when we attempt to edit it, frustration can occur. You aren't editing uncompressed video by any means, if it was it would be 4K footage being that the 5D2 sensor is 5616x3744. Wouldn't that be awesome if we COULD get that out of it??
To be clearer on this, the 5D2 compresses the image down to 1920x1200 in H.264 (H.264 for video is the same thing as shooting a still image in JPEG format... we have RAW for stills but not for video YET in a 5D2). The compression used by Canon stuffs the video down into an 8-bit 4:2:0 color space which is more lossy than I would prefer, but I imagine Canon did that to make the footage as manageable as can be. In fact, with Premiere Pro CS4, it was uneditable, it just froze Premiere. To fix this, we all bought Cineform's NeoScene which converts the 5D2 footage up to a 4:2:2 10-bit file (still 8-bit but now with headroom for color grading, etc) and converts it into an .AVI file so it'll run smoothly in Windows. They do have a Mac version also, and you can buy it at VideoGuys.com for $99. ANYWAY, that's how we were able to edit in CS4. Now that CS5 is out, Adobe went to great lengths to accomodate the DSLR world by adding the right presets, etc, but most importantly by adding the MPE for all editors to leverage for all types of formats. not just DSLR vids. Now, the Mercury Playback Engine helps greatly, but as soon as you stack some effects onto the footage, it can still get jumpy. To this day I still convert everything with NeoScene because in conjuction with the MPE it's even that much better. Premiere Pro CS5 does leverage the CUDA technology in the video cards to help power that MPE, but that does mean having a compatible Nvidia graphics card, not sure if you have that in your Mac. I know there's a GTX 285 for the Mac that would work, you would have to research other models such as the uber-expensive Quadro series. I don't think there's a card in the 400 or 500 Nvidia series for Mac yet. But that may be a good reason to get NeoScene anyway.
OK, what on earth did all that have to do with your Mac's hard drives? Glad you asked! Once you ensure you have the best converted file available to use for editing (by doing all that above), you then want to place that file on your fastest drive which would be your RAID5 config. You need read speed like crazy which RAID5 will give you. You also get redundancy with that. I use RAID0 but I always back up my footage first so if RAID0 drops, I can quickly recover. I realize that doesn't help me halfway through a 6 hour encoding session, lol. ANYWAY, there's one issue with your setup: The OS and programs are also on that RAID5, correct? That's what you don't want. It'd be great if you could install a 10K RPM 300GB WD Raptor and put your OS and the Adobe Suite on that drive and save your RAID5 for your assets. I would go one step further and add one more drive to write your output video to and to also use for the Adobe Scratch Disks. Don't use partitions, and by all means don't use the external drives, FireWire is way too slow. The only external drive you would want is eSata, but really you want your footage on that RAID5 setup. I know, this all sounds kookie, you probably just wanted to get the powerhouse Mac with RAID and be done with it. That'd be fine for gaming, but for video editing you need the right setup, it will make your life much much easier.
BTW, do you have at least 12GB of RAM? We love Adobe software, but it eats ram like a cheetah eats gazelles... 
OK, that's all I have. Whatever you choose to do, just make sure your footage is on that RAID5 rig, even if it shares it with the OS. Worst case, you could always buy just one additional internal drive and put all the Adobe software on it, and leave the OS on the RAID5 with your assets, because the Mac OS loads mostly into memory anyway.
Recap: Your best config if it was possible:
- 10K RPM Raptor for OS and Adobe Suite
- RAID5 for all assets
- 3rd drive for Project files and output
- 4th drive for Scratch Disks and whatever other stuff you want on your PC (Photos, etc). Keep that stuff isolated so they're not in the way of your Assets or OS. The Scratch Disk is a great place to do that.
- Use your FireWire external for backups.
This is pretty much the setup I use on the PC I built and it works well.
There it is! If I'm off track, somebody pipe in, let's get Billy up and running the right way the first time!
Message was edited by: PaulieDC... fixing typos!
(1) I need to check whether my RAID controller allows me to attach both RAID and non-RAID devices at the same time. I have no idea if RAID cards do that, but I would say for optimal performance, you probably want ONLY your RAID set on that card.
(2) When I edit AVCHD, the files are only 1 or 2 Meg/sec. I'm not seeing why I need RAID for such low-bandwidth files. Please advise. I don't work with AVCHD all that much but I've heard it's a fiesty format to edit. It may use a more complex codec algorithm that takes up CPU, but don't quote me on that! Others will need to pipe in and answer that one. But I would say that your interests and formats may widen in the near future so it's better to have your RAIDed editing rig already configured and running, you never know what may happen...
AdChoices