One for people who know what a Cache is

dylanwinter said:
thanks for that...

I do need more disk space - and whatever I do in the future I will need it so I am dealing with that with two external 2TB hard drives - as I have to double everything up. KTL now involved quite a lot of digits.

Task manager suggests that premiere is using lots of resources

this machine is pretty stripped out when it comes to junk as it is not connected to the web

I will see what new empty drives does to the performance and then have a look at tweaking the cache

D
Click to expand...

If you really want to speed up your work then you could adopt a tier storage model of fast disks for work and slower disks for storage. As has been mentioned SSDs are very quick as hard disks but have the issue that when they fail they just go bang and that is it. The answer to this problem is a hybrid drive which is a normal hard disk with a big ssd cache on it. The benefit is that you get 95% of the performance of and SSD but if the ssd cache fails the normal hard disk part continues to work.

So if I was you I would go Hybrid drive as the main drive in the PC and use this to do you video editing on. When the project that you are working on has finished move to cheap external usb hard drives. want to rework a project move back to hybrid drive and start again.

Because video files are so large most editing programs create a secondary cache area on the hard disk that then gets hammered. The performance of a Hybrid drive compared to a normal HDD is nigh and day so you would really see the difference even with an old CPU.

Also they are not that pricy 50 squids.

http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Storage/cat/Hard-Drive---SSD/subcat/Hybrid-&-Dual-Drives
 
Gladys said:
Think about separating your data storage from your data processing. The data is precious to you and a bit of effort in securing it and separating it from your laptop/desktop will pay you in volumes. It also allows you to change/rebuild/upgrade your PC without having to go through all the trauma of worrying about data. It's also worthwhile upgrading your OS as new ones come out, because many of the glitches get overcome in later versions.

Rather than just having two 2TB HDD's, you'd be better off buying a 2TB network attached storage (NAS) and mirroring the disks to give you some protection against individual disk failure. That means that any device attached to your local network will be able to access the data (providing you give the right permissions). Most of these devices (Synology, Qnap, Buffalo to name a few) will also give you utilities that will enable you to backup the NAS to another device as an additional pair of braces to your belt....

It's the best sinlge thing I've ever done to my home set up and I don't have the same requirement as yuo to protect the data
Click to expand...

+1 with the added benefit that with a NAS you can easily up/download materials when away from home (your own little cloud).
 
If you go to task manager and disable every process then re start the computer will that stop any random processes you don't need?
 
agurney said:
+1 with the added benefit that with a NAS you can easily up/download materials when away from home (your own little cloud).
Click to expand...

Brilliant tech but could it be overkill for Dylan's needs? How about something like a Seagate Hybrid SSD - many of the benefits in performance without too much cost... the one in my work laptop is just amazing. As for the mirroring... a backup is just as good in a home office setting and perhaps even better.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?catid=14&groupid=701&subid=1894
 
agurney said:
+1 with the added benefit that with a NAS you can easily up/download materials when away from home (your own little cloud).
Click to expand...

I have a Zyxel NSA325 NAS. It was good value and worked well until recently. Now it tells me that the RAID is degraded, crashes if I ask it to fix it, doesn't recognise a brand new replacement disk in either slot (SMART says the originals are fine, by the way) and is slowly losing functionality. I therefore have a dying device with my data on one or two drives in proprietary formats, which is not helpful. I have managed to get half the stuff off, and as soon as I can find time to buy a 1TB USB drive I hope to get the rest. NAS is fine when it works, but a pain in the neck if anything goes wrong.
 
JumbleDuck said:
I have a Zyxel NSA325 NAS. It was good value and worked well until recently. Now it tells me that the RAID is degraded, crashes if I ask it to fix it, doesn't recognise a brand new replacement disk in either slot (SMART says the originals are fine, by the way) and is slowly losing functionality. I therefore have a dying device with my data on one or two drives in proprietary formats, which is not helpful. I have managed to get half the stuff off, and as soon as I can find time to buy a 1TB USB drive I hope to get the rest. NAS is fine when it works, but a pain in the neck if anything goes wrong.
Click to expand...


Are you sure it's proprietary? Good chance it's just a Linux box using md or LVM or similar? Good luck getting your data, hope it works out.
 
gordmac said:
If you go to task manager and disable every process then re start the computer will that stop any random processes you don't need?
Click to expand...

No, they'll just restart (be judicious, killing some processes will give you an instant shutdown)
Use msconfig to disable the startup programs.
If you feel adventurous you can also go to the services tab and stop various services from starting ... likely candidates can be found in the task manager processes tab.
 
yachtailsa said:
Are you sure it's proprietary? Good chance it's just a Linux box using md or LVM or similar? Good luck getting your data, hope it works out.
Click to expand...

I dunno what it is and haven't been able to find out. The NSA325 does indeed some flavour of Linux, but it's software RAID which I gather offers all sorts of interestingly incompatible opportunities. I shall delicately extract my data, if I can, and then do some experiments. The only things I really care about are a few video files of TV appearances, which I could probably retrieve from elsewhere if I really had to. Otherwise it was a music server (all on my phone as well) and backup drive for my desktop. All the really crucial stuff is on Dropbox.
 
JumbleDuck said:
I dunno what it is and haven't been able to find out. The NSA325 does indeed some flavour of Linux, but it's software RAID which I gather offers all sorts of interestingly incompatible opportunities. I shall delicately extract my data, if I can, and then do some experiments. The only things I really care about are a few video files of TV appearances, which I could probably retrieve from elsewhere if I really had to. Otherwise it was a music server (all on my phone as well) and backup drive for my desktop. All the really crucial stuff is on Dropbox.
Click to expand...

It is almost certainly an ext3 or an ext4 file system.

If you install the support for these on your desktop (windows?) then you should be able to put the disks in a usb caddy and just read them. If you had the disks mirrored then you have 2 chances to get the files. If you have a linux desktop then again you could just mount them from a usb caddy and read them.

Edit: I have just read the menu and the filesystem is ext4 or XFS.
 
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Gladys said:
Think about separating your data storage from your data processing. The data is precious to you and a bit of effort in securing it and separating it from your laptop/desktop will pay you in volumes. It also allows you to change/rebuild/upgrade your PC without having to go through all the trauma of worrying about data. It's also worthwhile upgrading your OS as new ones come out, because many of the glitches get overcome in later versions.

Rather than just having two 2TB HDD's, you'd be better off buying a 2TB network attached storage (NAS) and mirroring the disks to give you some protection against individual disk failure. That means that any device attached to your local network will be able to access the data (providing you give the right permissions). Most of these devices (Synology, Qnap, Buffalo to name a few) will also give you utilities that will enable you to backup the NAS to another device as an additional pair of braces to your belt....

It's the best sinlge thing I've ever done to my home set up and I don't have the same requirement as yuo to protect the data
Click to expand...

While I agree RAID1 (data mirroring) is not a bad idea from data protection perspective, NAS accessed speeds are a lot slower and not ideal for high I/O required for video editing. If going RAID route an external array connected by eSATA would be best option.
 
agurney said:
No, they'll just restart (be judicious, killing some processes will give you an instant shutdown)
Use msconfig to disable the startup programs.
If you feel adventurous you can also go to the services tab and stop various services from starting ... likely candidates can be found in the task manager processes tab.
Click to expand...
Ok thanks, didn't think it could be that simple!
 
agurney said:
No, they'll just restart (be judicious, killing some processes will give you an instant shutdown)
Use msconfig to disable the startup programs.
If you feel adventurous you can also go to the services tab and stop various services from starting ... likely candidates can be found in the task manager processes tab.
Click to expand...

Be careful using Msconfig to disable startup programs permanently.

Msconfig was designed originally as a Microsoft techies tool but it found it's way out into the big world. It's a debugging tool, designed to temporarily stop programs from starting with Windows in order to determine whether one of them is causing problems. The problem with using it as a permanent solution is that if you uninstall a program that is disabled via Msconfig it may well not uninstall properly, or at all. It's even possible that you may not then be able to reinstall it either (in the worst cases). So before uninstalling anything, check that it's not disabled via Msconfig, if it is then enable it and reboot.

The wisest course for programs you want to stop starting with Windows is either to uncheck the Start With Windows option in the programs preferences or, if you no longer use the program, uninstall it.
 
I tracked it down to a 2 tb seagate external hard disk that is/was showing an intermittent fault

It runs for five seconds at reasonable rate and then cuts out for up to ten seconds

resource monitor showed me the problem

it was being asked for data and was waiting for a moment or two to cough it up

I tried swapping usb ports, cable, power sources but it behaves the same

Its sister is behaving okay

so currently trying to persuade it to hand over the last few bits of data before it can be consigned to the bin

I have backups of everything apart from a few bits and bobs from google earth but the tours are also stored on google earth

the old editing computer lives on to fight another day

thanks for your hhelp chaps
 
Dylan - Daft as it may seem try turning the disk so the disk itself is vertical and see if you can then get the data off it. I had a problem on my wife's computer where it would not start up and found just by chance that rotating the disk allowed me to take an image that I could then put straight onto a new disk.
 
Como said:
Dylan - Daft as it may seem try turning the disk so the disk itself is vertical and see if you can then get the data off it. I had a problem on my wife's computer where it would not start up and found just by chance that rotating the disk allowed me to take an image that I could then put straight onto a new disk.
Click to expand...

Good plan

I have alredy tried that

it is insane what you do to try to get stuff working

I thought it might have been temperature related so it was propped up on a couple of books for a while

it is rather odd the data rate goes from 3mb down to 0.1mb for a bit then up again

I have the data - but the file structure across the two disks is not in perfect alignment

D
 
JumbleDuck said:
I dunno what it is and haven't been able to find out. The NSA325 does indeed some flavour of Linux, but it's software RAID which I gather offers all sorts of interestingly incompatible opportunities. I shall delicately extract my data, if I can, and then do some experiments. The only things I really care about are a few video files of TV appearances, which I could probably retrieve from elsewhere if I really had to. Otherwise it was a music server (all on my phone as well) and backup drive for my desktop. All the really crucial stuff is on Dropbox.
Click to expand...

The disks are controlled by a linux software raid. Assembling and mounting manually is not hard - you can use mdadm

In essence the steps are as follows (your exact commands may be different)

1. Connect a drive to another chassis running linux. Open a terminal, become root and identify the device

Code: 
cat /proc/partitions
You are searching for a disk (sdx) with the right size, having two partitions (sdx1 and sdx2). The size is given in blocks.

2. Assuming the disk is sdb, you should be able assemble the array manually

Code: 
mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sdb2 --run
3. Then mount the array
Code: 
mkdir -p /tmp/mnt
mount -o ro /dev/md0 /tmp/mnt
Your files should be accessible in /tmp/mnt.
 
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