-
iMac RAID solution?
I am a small video production company shooting with an HPX-170 and running FCP, Motion etc. on my iMac. I am looking for a RAID that will function as my capture scratch and let me remove all but my applications from my iMac’s hard drive.
I want something fast enough to edit HD footage off of through FW800 but would also love to have some redundancy as in RAID 1 but fear that might be too slow?
I’ve been looking at the iStoragePro Dock II https://www.istoragepro.com/prod.php?id=it2dock
or
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/MirrorRAID/Perhaps RAID 1 or RAID 0 are not the best options for this application?
Any help or insight would be great, I’ve just started out on my own as a company and have been going in circles trying to find what solution will work best for me!
Thanks!!
-
17 Replies
-
Either one is good for the purpose; personally, I’d go for the iT2DOCK or G-RAID. Ensure the box has decent 7200rpm drives; this way, FW800 will be the bottleneck, not the drives or the RAID level.
Alex (DV411)
-
Forget about RAID 1 and redundancy with your iMac. IMacs are limited in their connectivity, and so you’re pretty limited in your choices, to just RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 1 is a complete waste of resources; it eats up throughput and space on your RAID at the expense of creating automated backup.
Just get yourself the fastest FW-800 RAID you can afford and backup manually to the most inexpensive hard drives you can find. Keep in kind, media backups aren’t an everyday necessity, you only have to backup media after capturing new material, so why waste your time, money, and hardware resources focusing on something you can do at lunch with one click of your mouse.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
-
[Alex Geroulaitis] ” FW800 will be the bottleneck, not the drives or the RAID level.”
Alex,
While one could argue that RAID 1 reads are not hampered as much as writes, and therefore editing performance is not significantly affected, I still think RAID 1 is a huge waste of resources, especially for users who have been using single drives. I say, if you’re going to invest in a RAID, invest in the performance RAID offers. Backups of media files just aren’t something that absolutely has to be automated.
BTW, I have an 8-drive RAID 5 myself, but that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
-
You got a point. Still, there is some value in RAID1 for light and medium duty projects: e.g. you spent a day editing an urgent project, only to see one of the drives fail at the end of the day, and the whole edited project with it. Sure, your source files are backed up, but if you start re-creating the project from scratch, you’ll miss the deadline, and possibly, ruin a good working relationship with your client.
Or, you could have spent $200-300 extra on RAID1 protection and that would have saved the day, the time, the project and the client.
Alex (DV411)
-
[David Roth Weiss] “RAID 1 is a complete waste of resources; it eats up throughput and space on your RAID at the expense of creating automated backup.”
I don’t mean to come across as pedantic, but RAID 1 provides redundancy, not backup.
A lot of people like the idea of RAID 1 because they think it makes their data safe. RAID 1 may be a little safer than storing data on a single drive, but it only protects you against one risk — the failure of a single disk. File system corruption, accidental deletion, controller failure, fire, flood, theft, etc. can all wipe out your data, no matter what RAID level you are using.
[David Roth Weiss] “Just get yourself the fastest FW-800 RAID you can afford and backup manually to the most inexpensive hard drives you can find. Keep in kind, media backups aren’t an everyday necessity, you only have to backup media after capturing new material, so why waste your time, money, and hardware resources focusing on something you can do at lunch with one click of your mouse.”
This sounds really reasonable, given the budget. I’d also think about another drive for Time Machine or Time Capsule for automatic hourly backups (with versioning) of the project files.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Walter Soyka] “I don’t mean to come across as pedantic, but RAID 1 provides redundancy, not backup. “
I understand that Walter. I’m saying the same thing as you…
Joel, like others who look to RAID 1 for this purpose, is essentially looking for a way to create and automated backup, and there are much cheaper and better ways of achieving that.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
-
[David Roth Weiss] “I understand that Walter. I’m saying the same thing as you… Joel, like others who look to RAID 1 for this purpose, is essentially looking for a way to create and automated backup, and there are much cheaper and better ways of achieving that.”
Absolutely. I should have phrased that a little better. You are an expert and I know that you know the difference between backup and redundancy. I just think it’s very important to clearly point out that difference for less-experienced readers who may stumble across this thread in the future.
RAID is not backup!
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
So with that mentality, what would be the optimal configuration of a RAID? RAID 0?
Also, how important (useful) is it to be able to remove and swap the discs in an enclosure?
-
[Joel Thiessen] “So with that mentality, what would be the optimal configuration of a RAID? RAID 0?”
Joel,
As I said earlier, you have very limited choices, RAID 0 and RAID 1. You don’t have the luxury of hardware RAIDs, which are the only really secure ways of achieving the bigger and better protection features of RAID 5, 6, etc. So, if we’ve ruled out RAID 1, that leaves just one more possibility. Right?
[Joel Thiessen] “Also, how important (useful) is it to be able to remove and swap the discs in an enclosure?”
It can be a nice feature, but you’ll typically find that once you’re set up your primary RAID, and it’s working perfectly, you’ll tend to move things on and off the drives rather than swapping drives, especially because big drives are so cheap these days.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.
-
[Joel Thiessen] “So with that mentality, what would be the optimal configuration of a RAID? RAID 0?”
RAID1. RAID0 will give you twice the capacity but no protection and no significant performance boost given that the pipe (FW800) isn’t all that fast to begin with.
[Joel Thiessen] “Also, how important (useful) is it to be able to remove and swap the discs in an enclosure?”
Not (important or useful): I assume the plan is to take a drive out and store it on a shelf for backup, and this is not a great practice.
David Ross suggested using separate external (or internal with a docking station) drives, and Walter – using Time Machine, both valid and efficient backup practices.
Alex (DV411)
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up