[Gllug] OT hardware recommendations

[Andy Farnsworth]

- Maybe some  some video manipulation taken from the DV camcorder that they
have
(has what looks like a firewire connector)

A quick word here: Sony makes some very nice computers that have some entry
level video editing software (Windows) that comes with it.  If this is all
he is intersted in, it is a pretty nice package.  Also, remember that an
hour of DV video saves to about 20 Gig of hard disk space.  Plus you need
room for the scratch pad, etc so for Video editing you will need a very
large volume.  You will also find that this information is seldom left on
the hard disk so it doesn't need to be a mirror or striped with parity but
does need to be fast so use striping, look into an IDE RAID controller,
3ware makes some very nice ones, and several IDE drives.  For example,
http://www.tmc-uk.com/Products/storage/RAID/pATA_7500.htm is a very nice
product with good linux support and really has very good throughput if you
use multiple drives.  You can get 4 (or more) 80 gig drives fairly cheap and
have a really killer scratch disk for video editing.  Then get one more
drive for the OS and applications and you are ready to go.  Like was said
earlier, the Single SCSI disk won't show much performance improvement over
IDE, but will in RAID configurations of multiple disks.  The 3Ware IDE RAID
controllers get arround this by supplying each IDE drive with it's own IDE
Bus.

- Memory, Should I spend the extra for ECC, and would there be a benefit for
going for branded RAM?

Again, as stated by others, be sure to get good name brand (Crucial) RAM.
ECC gives no speed benefit, but does help protect against single memory
errors.  In this case, probably not needed, spend the saved money on the
RAID.

- Any recommendations for a motherboard?  I have no clue here...
	If you are going with RAID, be sure to get a MB that has 64 bit PCI slots.
Otherwise you throttle your I/O to sharply.

Also, look into a DVD-R (or other DVD recordable format) drive for when the
videos have been edited.  It should let him create his own DVDs that he can
play normally in any DVD player.  Research this one well as I don't know
much about the different formats, but I do have experience trying to get DV
video onto CDs and it just doesn't work.  My friends wedding was 17
CDs!!!!!!!

Andy Farnsworth


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