How much improvement would a RAID 0 setup help my speed?

Question

Hello so i do lots of HD rendering and im wondering how would a RAID0 help my render times because i thought the CPU does most of the work. anyway the drives would be 2 750 GB 7200 RPM's in RAID 0. what would be my speed increase if any?

Answer 1

You should not oversimplify such considerations. The question really is, how you handle your footage and what your render settings are. This includes things like multiprocessing, naturally, but even for conventional renders it matters where and how the items are stored and what format they are in. Yes, a RAID may help, if you use lots of footage and that footage is stored on the drive, so reading the frames goes faster, but it may not necessarily help with storing the files, as only every few seconds or minutes a framer will be written. In reverse, a RAID could help, if you are outputting the same clip to different formats just by adding multiple output modules to the same render queue entry, but that one is rare. One other possible improvemnt would relate to the disk cahe, but it's really mostly only relevant for RAM previews. It also becomes a question, of whether AE actualyl fills it in the first place - if your project is not structured accordingly and AE thinks, it can calculate your effects faster than reading them from the cache, it will not use the disk cache for this stuff... It's really much more complicated, so you should evaluate your options based on the pointers I tried to give you.
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