Pure Video Editing PC. Could use some help/suggestions/thoughts/opinions?

[Harlow]

Seems like the ASRock Phantom Gaming Arc A770 is currently likely my best option since it seems like it supports the footage natively when most other video cards do not.
Unfortunately, that particular video card model isn't listed on the mobo capability list which I tend to rely on heavily,

Perhaps I'm naive or lucky, but I've plugged dozens of different graphics cards into systems and they just work (after loading drivers). I check the mobo QVL for CPU compatibility and the version of BIOS required, but I tend to ignore recommendations for RAM and I've never checked GPU compatibility. When I was considering my first AM5 DDR5 system at the end of 2022, DDR5 RAM was not available in faster speed options at an affordable price (for me), plus there wasn't much choice where I live, so I ended up with 2 x 32GB Kingston Fury with a maximum speed of DDR5-4800 (no big deal with programs like DaVinci Resolve).

I wouldn't let the absence of the A770 in the mobo's QVL act as a deterrent. Far more important is to research the availability and stablity of graphics drivers for the GPU. I use NVidia's Studio drivers on my RTX 3060 and 3070 editing rigs. For systems with older RX 580 cards I use the AMD Pro driver as opposed to the AMD Adrenalin gaming driver. I don't need the adrenalin hit when the latest gaming driver crashes near the end of a long video render. Unlikely, but it could happen if a particular "fix" for a game isn't 1,000% stable.

1 - M.2 drive (4 TB) for the O/S and applications.

Do you need 4TB for the OS and programs? I know apps are getting bigger each year, but you might get away with 2TB and spend the saving on another hard disk. My largest M.2 boot drive is 1TB and it's only half full. 138GB of that is made up from two Hyper-V Virtual Machine images, so the 1TB drive would only be one third full if I deleted the VMs.

You certainly are filling the new machine up with lots of M.2 drives, but who am I to speak with multiple systems ontaining at least 8 hard disks each. These days I buy hard disks in boxes of 20 from a friend who works in IT. For relatively unimportant builds which wouldn't concern me when a drive fails (some of my TrueNAS Core RAID-Z2 servers) a bunch of Enterprise grade used disks work fine. They may have hundreds or over one thousand days of use, but SMART shows some of them had only 60 start/stop cycles during their previous life in data centres.

For more critical applications and my main TrueNAS Core server, I buy brand new drives and always look for CMR/PMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording), not SMR (Shingle Magnetic Recording). SMR drives are anathema to FreeNAS and TrueNAS, where resilvering can take days on SMR drives instead of hours on CMR drives. TrueNAS in particular does not work well with SMR. Most other OS aren't bothered, but you may experience sluggish performance when writing to SMR which has already been subjected to a considerable amount of use.

https://forums.truenas.com/t/have-you-been-bitten-by-smr-hdds/25480

2 - External hard drives (I likely can use my existing backup drives for now)

I'm guessing your two external backup drives might be 3.5" desktop drives in USB3 housings? I have a cupboard full of these (4GB, 6GB, 8GB) but rarely use them now.

For a start, the plastic enclosures on WD and Seagate USB desktop drives have very poor ventilation and hard disk temperatures rise into the mid-fifties Celcius, especially during long file transfers. Attaching a small USB tangential (snail) cooling fan or pointing a desk fan across the USB enclosure brings the temperature down somewhat, but it's not ideal.

Second, if you stand a USB desktop drive on one edge, to "improve" cooling, knocking the drive over can be a death knell and curtains for your valuable data if you suffer a head crash. Hard disks are pretty robust and can survive a surprisingly high G-level during shock and vibration testing (which I've performed in labs at work). They can cope with the occasional bump when spinning, but there's no point taking unnecessary risks if the housing's orientation is unstable.

Third, I not a big fan of USB3 (never tried USB4) for transferring files. I experienced occasional file corruption when transferring a days shoot of RAW + JPG files (up to 100GB) from CF and SD cards to two laptops using high quality card readers. Nowadays, the 100GB+ per day on vacation includes GoPro files. The fix was to discard long, thin 1m (3ft) USB3 cables and buy quality 30cm (1ft) cables. There's a good reason why Crucial supply very short 20cm (8in) USB-C cables with their X6, X9, X10 portable SSDs. I use FreeFileSync and perform a byte-by-byte check on each of the three copies I make in the evenings, before wiping the cards for the following days shoot. CF cards can get expensive.

Fourth. There's the potential problem of "sector translation" in the USB-to-SATA printed circuit board that interfaces the USB input to the housing and the SATA hard disk inside. Less likely these days, but it can make "shucking" the drive and reading back data in a desktop PC tricky or impossible, if the USB-to-SATA board in the housing breaks.

Fifth. The dreaded (as far as I'm concerned) use of Shingle disks to reduce the price of desktop USB drives. I know SMR is a perfectly acceptable solution to increase capacity by 10 to 20%, by writing overlapping tracks partially obscuring the previous track, but I've decided I'd rather pay more and get Conventional drives. For archive purposes, especially with large files, SMR has its place, but if you're writing/deleting/writing tens of thousands of very small files, SMR can be really slow. It might be interesting to look up the spec of your 20TB drive to see if it's CMR or SMR. Don't let me put you off SMR though.
https://www.howtogeek.com/803276/cmr-vs.-smr-hard-drives-whats-the-difference/

For my backup solutions, I have multiple drives in multiple desktop PCs gathered over the years (I keep old PCs for ages) and I now have four multi-drive TrueNas Core servers running RAID-Z2. Remember RAID is not a backup. In theory (but not always in practice) I can lose 2 hard disks from an 8-disk Z2 array and my data will not be affected. I stopped using 25GB BD-R years ago.

I also write backups to cheap 800GB (native capacity) LTO-4 tapes on Quantum external SAS tape drives, purchased nearly-new on eBay for the equivalent of US $100 each in 2018. Packs of 5 new tapes set me back the equivalent of US $60 to $80, then I found bulk supplies of barely used tapes at US $2 and bought loads. Even if some backup tapes fail, I've made several identical copies of each dataset, and there are more backups elsewhere.

Whatever you decide, don't keep all your external backup drives connected to the computer at the same time, in case Ransomware or lightning strikes your computer. Consider additional backup solutions to your two existing drives, just in case they both fail. I know you've got 3 copies of your work, but are they all in the same room? An off-site backup is even better.

Enjoy.

 

[Justavideoguy]

Thanks Harlow for sharing your past experience. Calms some of my hesitation to building again. I am sure most components are fine. I just happened to be just overly cautious since a previous build had a bad component that wasn't on the mobo capability list ended up causing weeks of troubleshooting, research, back and forth with manufacturers, and RMAs. I am just trying to avoid that experience again and also the reason I very much considered just not building ever again. The time and frustration was all consuming for a while trying to get the system working. I know some on this forum probably enjoy resolving for such issues but I seem to enjoy more the building and a completed system working than the troubleshooting part of fixing problems that arises. Little bumps on the road and learning from it I am ok with but weeks of frustrating troubleshooting parts that were bad out of the box purchased brand new wasn't as fun after a certain point. I lean more so on that mobo list now because of that bad experience I had last time.

I agree the 4 TB is probably overkill. My current system has a much smaller drive in it, but I ended up running out of space and don't like running drives really close to capacity. I vowed that if I ever did another build, I wouldn't cut corners on storage for the primary O/S and program drive. The thought of having to upgrade a larger drive that contained the O/S and all the programs made me cringe. I was just leaning towards plenty of space this time. I haven't ruled out downsizing the drive yet since it is too much and even 2 TB should be more than enough room I would think as well. I'll have to check prices right before purchase to see if the difference is worth my overcompensation of storage for peace of mind of having way more space than probably needed.

Thanks for sharing the information on Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives. I wasn't aware of any of that until you mentioned it and was able to read your links. The current Seagate Exos X20 20 TB drive I plan to install lists in the user manual as a Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drive. The Hitachi Deskstar NAS 6 TB drive (from a previous system I was considering reusing) I am not sure if it is CMR or SMR. Google's AI lists it is CMR but I really don't trust that output yet. I checked their links provided from the Google AI search results and it didn't list it either way, so I am really not sure.

Yes, you are correct the 2 external backup drives are the cheap WD purchased on sale a while back. I do back up the data to give me a little piece of mind but at the same time I have had some other drives in the past fail, so they are definitely not fool proof. It is a kind of better than nothing solution for the budget. I use TGRMN Vice Versa Pro Backup software. I haven't tried FreeFileSync as well as wasn't aware of the potential shucking, RAW+JPG, or cable length potential issues. Lots of good information. I would like to invest in a different back up system but it isn't in the budget for this year. I actually value really just my actively working files much more than my older projects. I back up both but I can't even remember the time I went back to an older project. I think I have only gone back once to an older project. There is definitely a prioritization on backing up the actively working project files and assets but the older project files less so. I think I have just been conditioned to think I need to back up in multiple places for everything when really the actively working project files and assets are the only really important area I need to back up besides a very small number of data files (word/excel). I am looking at offsite storage as well for a 3rd backup. Hoping to get the offsite storage implemented after the build.

Thanks for the links. Great information.