Need some opinions on system design

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Steel Chicken

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OK, heres the scenario.

Building a Dual Xeon budget setup (LV's) on a PC-DL mobo
Its going to be used to do multimedia editing/processing and CD/ROM DVD burning.

Ive got 2 DVD burners (IDE)
a 200GB SATA drive
and I have a 10gb and a 20gb IDE drive available if needed.

What id like to do, is buildup this system so that I can simulateanously burn 2 dvds at once. Id like to setup the disks for maximum peformance, and to minimize IO bottlenecks. In the past I have seperated OS/programs on one drive, data on another, and sometimes pagefiles temp drives on even another, and gotten excellent results.

Heres what initially came to mind for my proposed setup.

IDE Channel 1
20GB IDE drive for OS and program install
DVD burner #1

IDE Channel 2
10GB IDE drive for pagefile/scratch drive purposes
DVD burner #2

SATA Channel 1
200GB bulk storage drive

keep in mind the IDE hardrives are kinda old, 5+ years and are prolly pretty slow. My main concern is being able to seperate all the I/O traffic, so the DVD's being burned dont run out of data, and the system peforms optimaly when converting files, etc.

Any thoughts, or ideas?
Should I just dump the IDE HD's and get a newer SATA drive for the OS/pagefile?
Im not concerned about top speed, but rather wish to avoid I/O saturation and latency problems.
 
just me, but I woul drop those small drives and get another Sata drive in there
 
I don't know how good of luck of you're going to have with two DVD burners on the same ATA channel. If you want to try burning two DVDs at once, I'd make each burner the master and only drive on its own ATA channel. You can get an add-in ATA PCI card to hook up those older hard drives later, or use the Promise controller on the board. Your best bet for eliminating I/O bottlenecks is to use the storage ports built into the southbridge (the native PATA ports and the ICH5R SATA ports) for your most important I/O tasks. With one SATA boot drive and another SATA data drive for the DVD images ready to be burned, you may be able to pull this off. 16X DVD is about 22MB/sec - I wouldn't trust a 7200 RPM Drive to keep up with 2 DVD burners, as most of those drives drop below 40MB/sec in their inner zones on sequential transfer. I know it's kind of sad, but I wouldn't trust a 10GB or 20GB IDE drive to keep up with a 16X DVD burner, and they are certainly not going to be reliable. I have only bad experience mixing hard and optical drives on the same ATA channel, and slave drives take a good size performance hit.

I'd go with one DVD burner on each PATA port on ICH5R, your existing 200GB SATA drive on the Promise controller that ships with the board to feed one of the DVD burners, and either a 73GB Raptor for boot/page file and a Maxtor DiamondMax10/MaxLineIII or Hitachi 7K250/7K400 drive for additional storage and to feed the other DVD burner. That, IMO, is your best way to support the simultaneous burning of 2 DVDs.
 
thanks for the info. ill try to sum up the important stuff, to make sure i got it:

each DVD get its own PATA channel, as master, no other drive.
each DVD has its own SATA drive for drive image

how important is it to get the OS off of those drives though?
Would 3 drives be ideal then? Or two be just fine?

meaning:
200GB SATA has OS/pagefile/programs/file storage and supports DVD 1
smaller SATA drive to support DVD 2

or
small SATA OS/Pagefile/programs
200GB SATA files/ images for DVD 1
smaller SATA images for DVD 2

thanks again
 
If your system has enough RAM (at least 1GB) and you keep it free of spyware/adware/malware/bloatware to keep paging to disk or I/O from background processes from tying up your boot drive, you should be able to get by with just two hard drives. However, the more stuff you have running in the background, the less likely your boot drive is also going to be able to support a burn process.
 
OK. the system will have 1GB of RAM, and running pretty lean as far as installed software...its not going to be my daily rig. just video/audio editing and burning software.

ive got a 100GB SATA I can use for the OS/program/DVD 1 drive. ill set it up that way first and see how it goes.

thanks for the advice.
 
One question pops to mind: Are you going to be burning two copies of the same thing, or two different images at once? That will have a big effect on the amount of I/O the system generates during a burn.

edit: also, do you have a specific burning program in mind already?

 
uzor said:
One question pops to mind: Are you going to be burning two copies of the same thing, or two different images at once? That will have a big effect on the amount of I/O the system generates during a burn.

edit: also, do you have a specific burning program in mind already?

Click to expand...

Both circumstances, sometimes will be duplicating the same image, sometimes doing different images. The DVD authoring software I use is ULead. I can also use Nero if need be.

Basically, im going to be turning raw video footage into a nice finished DVD product, and would like to do all my editing, one at a time, then crank out the DVD's.
 
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