I was told that Xpress Pro runs best on 250 hard drives and it's better to have a few of them than say one 500G hard drives.

I'm just wondering if anybody found this to be practically true. I've run out of space on my system and I need to buy some internal hardrives. Not sure if I should go for 500 as it's looking very attractive to me right now. Howver don't want to slow down my system.

Also will any SATA hardrive do for Xpress or is there a particulat brand they prefer. I can't find the webpage that has the specs anymore in order to verify this info.

thanks.

Chinedu.

It's really 250gb partitions not drives.  The reasoning is that with OMFI media the databases have trouble indexing the media when they are larger and if you did get corrupt files and need to divide and conquer the entire folder you'll be glad you only have 250GB or less in the folder.  With MXF it's not really as important since it automatically creates new folders after 5000 items

I see. Thanks. So I guess in my case I can go ahead and buy the 500G as I don't really intend to partition the internal drive. I think I have 4 more slots or so left on my motherboard for hard drive and I'll use them as the drive for external projects.

I haven't seen hard drive size have any impact on performance with my system.  I'm capturing two 70 minute services each week directly to two 500GB (striped as a 1TB array) Seagate SATA drives and have had no problems.  I later edit from these drives and compress two files for the web from the same captured clip(s).

Now some SATA controllers don't handle the data transfer well enough to work smoothly but once you identify a combination that works the drives don't impact the system's performance at all, that I can tell.

I'm currently using 2 TB partitions with HD (MXF) projects.  I haven't noticed any issues.

 i was capturing and working with 300  gig sata drives 3 of them non raid  on my old axp 5.8  machine worked great  but you should consider a raid much faster

and sata 500 gig drives are  cheep now 80 bucks usd on line just think a tb of storage for $160.00usd

 take it from someone with more experience recovering corupted omfi files/databases than i care to admit...

i have a couple of TB of external storage spread across a number of 300Gb+ drives (none raid), you WILL experience major problems with database & file corruptions if your OMFI file folders exceed a certain number of files.  and as Ravidedit said, if you ever come to this, you'll thank your lucky stars you don't have more than 300Gb of files to manually sort through.

system speed & memory are only minor factors in this issue, for at some point, avid simply can't index the volume of files fast enough.  and it really is the volume of files, more than the size of the individual files.  as some have mentioned, that's why there isn't much of an issue with mxf files due to the automatic file-count-partitioning.

i have thousands of files, hundreds of Gb, that are still offline due to corruptions that happened as a direct result of over-filling hard discs.  i can't get them back because i don't have the time to manually sort the directories a few files at a time.  you could say that i've made this mistake enough to have learned this issue from every side!

shane

Indigospin, if you're faced with that problem again display file details in your OMFI folder and sort by creation date.  You can then easily lasso grouped times and dates in a block and move them to a new directory.

If you create a folder called disc_part_2 or similar and create a new OMFI MediaFiles folder inside that, you can put your moved files there.  Then just type "subst X: D:\disc_part_2" in the Run box in your start menu, where X is a free drive letter on your system, and D is your media drive.

Avid will rebuild the database on your new fake drive X next time you launch it, and your media may be available again.

A slight clarification. It is not the size of the drive but actual file count within a given Windows directory. Windows 32 bit has difficulty loading directories that have more than 10,000 files/objects in it (including sub folders). This will hinder Avid's performance as it needs to access and change files constantly during editing. The 250 GB size became the rule of thumb as it prevents commonly used low res formats (15:1s, 20:1, 14:1 etc) from reaching the 10K limit ("smaller files, higher file count").

Workig with higher bandwidth video like DV25, 1:1, etc the 250 GB rule of thumb does not really apply. We use as 1.6 TB partition in Symphony Nitris for 1:1 SD without problems.

So yes you can go over the 250GB as long as you are mindful of the Windows 32 bit performance limitation that kicks around 10k file count.

HTH

An additional clarification.  As the media file count increases, the size of the media databases also increases.  Large databases adversely affect performance.  Avid can handle many databases, just not large ones.  The MXF file count was originally 10,000.  With the release of the .7 versions, Avid decreased this to 5,000.  We still see problems with file counts over 3,500.  I've asked Avid to consider dropping the MXF limit to 2,500.

Thanks all for the comments. I've learnt a lot.

Never know what's going to happen in the future so I think to be safe I'm going to purchase a 500Gb and partition it to two 250s.

My 300GB OMFI media file folder currently has 2804 objects in it but haven't had any problems so far though.

 jwrl, thanks for the tip.  unfortunately i'm all too familear with the divide-and-conquer method of recovery & using new directories for same.  i have not tried to reload the directory on a new drive path.  i'll try that next time i get up the nerve to try to recover some more of my offline files!

i have never understood why particular files become corrupt, but i have experienced massive corruption in one directory where as much as 10 percent of the directory was corrupted & could not be scaned or indexed by Avid.  i found no rhyme or reason why at least 1 of every ten files was corrupt.  sometimes, it was every third file.

thanks, again.

shane

Drive performance is dependent on rotational speed (higher rpm reduces acccess time for random blocks and increases data transfer rate proportionally, and areal density (the more densely the bits are packed on a track, the higher the data transfer rate, but with increased seek times for random access because it takes longer for the head to settle down right on each ultra narrow track). The bits are already standing up (PMR recording), so I don't know what they'll have to come up with next to speed things up further...

The new 320 GB platters make it possible to create very fast 2-platter 640GB disks such as the WD 6400AKS (less than $90, and 100+ MB/s read and write for large blocks such as used for rendering, measured with BMD's Disk Speed Test), and several new 3-platter 1 TB disks. Not a clear choice on these yet, unless you need a 1TB for library clips, in which case WD's new Green drive is great, by virtue of running cool on low power (and a variable rotational speed 5400 - 7200 rpm).

And the first 1.5GB drive just came out last week. I'd wait a few weeks and let others suffer if there are any problems though.

I also think that "MTBF" is a useless measure when drive failure rates are as high as they are today.

I buy only WD and Seagate currently (and am concerned about Seagate's Chinese manufacturing QA seeming to be at a very modest level currently, not up to their usual), and have some Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB drives (good but again those DOAs...) and Hitachi (great drives with a high failure rate).