RAID 0 increases CCE encoding speed?

[Trimegisto]

Hi,

I have two IDE HD, a IBM Deskstar 40 Gb 7200 rpm and a Seagate 20 Gb 5400 rpm.

I'm thinking of setting up a RAID 0 striped volume in the following manner:

Primary master the 40 Gb HD with 3 partitions, one of 10 Gb for the OS (XP Pro), one of another 10 Gb for work related stuff and leave 20 Gb empty.

Secundary Master the 20 Gb with a single empty partition.

Then create a striped volume of 40 Gb made out of the 20 Gb from the first drive and the other 20 Gb.

Is this a good idea to increase CCE speed? I'm currently encoding at max 1.2 to 1.4 fps depending on the filters aplied.

Should I place the ripped vob files in the same volume as the destination mpv files? Or is it better to place the source and the destination in different drives?

Any ideas? Advices? Experiences to share?

Thank you!

[Arky]

Unless you are running something like a 15ghz CPU (be it single or dual) you are not going to see any improvement with striped RAID that you would not already see by simply reading from one drive and writing to another.

In other words, there is nothing detrimental with using striped RAID, but you could get maximum performance more easily by simply doing one, or both, of the following:

1) always write to a different drive than the one you are reading from.

2) always put each of the above drive on SEPERATE IDE channels - i.e. it is better to have one on IDE channel 1, and the other on IDE channel 2. It doesn't matter if they are slave or master, just so long as they are not slave and master on the same IDE channel.

Sorry, this is awkward to explain clearly in text. I hope you know what I mean.

And although the above are recommendations, you could still get a reasonable performance increase when reading from, and writing to, different drives even if they were using the same IDE channel. It's really a case of how far you want to take it.


Arky ;o)

[JSmooth]

I also agree with Arky if you can do it use the 2 drives.

RAID 0 may give better read performance and provide a slight improvement for heavy read operations (or all write) but the downside isn't worth the gain. In a RAID 0 stripe set if either (any) of the drives has a problem the whole set is dead. You lose everything. Stick with one drive read one drive write. Why double your risk?

Another consideration is the CPU overhead. If you are like me you want to find drives they need the CPU as little as possible so it can devote itself to the encode. Look for drives (storagereview.com / tomshardware.com) that have low CPU overhead under heavy load. 8MB of cache from Western Digital is a great thing!

[auenf]

my raid 0 is slower than my single disk atm (bad install, long story), but i still get .9 on a ~900 duron ;)

Enf...

[LB]

I beg to differ. It depends on your input source. I use huffy avi files and run on duals.. If I encode from a single scsi HD, I cap at like 2.09, but when I setup in raid0 I pull 3.22. So if you have a fast enough setup and your source is a huffy avi, then yes, raid0 does make a difference.

ARKY: Yes, you are also right about writing to a different drive. If you have that option do it. It will provide better speeds. That compared to raid0? Probably not, I bet the speeds would be equal. But raid0 will allow you to write and read from the same drive with no problems if your HDs are fast enough.