Confused about conflicting disk guidelines

Question

This is my first time on the forum and I am learning a tremendous amount - thanks everyone.  I am planning a machine with 3 disks and I'm a little confused about apparently conflicting guidellines issued by Harm.  In the "Storage rules for an editing rig", he states in Rule 4 that "If you have OS & programs on disk C:, set your pagefile on another disk".  However, in the "Guidelines  for disk disk storage", he says that, for 3 disks, that the OS, programs and pagefile should be on drive C:    Which is right?  Thanks

Answer 1

You may be somewhat confused, as it appears to be contradictory, but let me try to explain.
The basic rule for a fast disk system is to spread the load across as many disks as you have.
Every disk can access only one location at a time, and if a program requires access to a number of files, it would be great to have all those files on different disks, because then all these files can be accessed in parallel, making it much faster than in a serial way. There are however practical limitations to doing it that way. It does not make sense to organize the location of your clips in such a way that all these clips are on different disks, your potential gains would be far outweighed by the effort to move your clips to different disks. It does not even make sense to allocate a different disk for different tracks, although from a disk performance view it may make a lot of sense.
It has to make sense from a workflow view as well, so you have to compromise and try to follow a 'KISS' approach. As you can see from the Generic Guideline, the allocation of the pagefile can change, depending on the number of disks in the system. The reasoning behind it is to spread the load as much as possible but keep it as simple as possible from an organizational point of view.
Remember, it is only a guideline, not a strict rule. Consider for instance a situation where a lot of stock footage is used in nearly all projects. It makes sense to put all this stock footage on a different disk than your normal clips, if you also add a lot of music to your projects, it makes sense to use a separate disk for your music files, because you spread access load across different disks and still keep it relatively simple to organize. Now, if this does not happen often and only for very limited parts of the timeline, this may not be worth the effort or the dedicated disks. So, the guideline is exactly that and can be influenced by your specific workflow and material. Someone may want to have all his HDV captures on one disk and all his AVCHD imports on another disk and maybe from a third camera on a third disk, thereby improving multicam performance.
Hope this clears it up a bit.