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How do I get the fastest possible speeds out of 2 LaCie FW800 drives?
I’ve got 2 LaCie drives. Both D2 Extreme. One is a 160GB and the other is a 200GB. Is it possible to set the harddrives up to work together… like some sort of RAID? If so, how would I go about doing this or where could I find the information?
Thank you!
Michael
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7 Replies
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try barefeats.com they did some tests. Basically the idea was if each drive is on its own card or bus it would be fastest.
We use 2 drives striped as a raid array capturing and playing back 8 bit uncompressed and it works like a charm. -
The drives need to be identical. Same size, same brand, same model of drive in the case… same everything. And you’ll still only be limited to 100 MB/second.
If you really need better speed, then you should look at a SCSI or SATA array.
Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com -
[michael] “I’ve got 2 LaCie drives. Both D2 Extreme. One is a 160GB and the other is a 200GB. Is it possible to set the harddrives up to work together… like some sort of RAID? If so, how would I go about doing this or where could I find the information?”
First off, equal drives work best. Same model, same speeed.
You want to add a PCI FW800 card. Connect one drive to the card, connect the other drive directly to the Mac. Now using Apple Disc Utility, Create a New Raid and drag both drives into the RAID. That’s all there is to it.
With those two units you won’t get a whole lot of speed. Better to stripe LaCie Big Disk Extremes which have two drives inside each enclosure.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Thank you everyone! I’m wondering though… what would happen if I utilized this same procedure with either 2 G-RAID FW800’s or 2 G-RAID SATA’s ? Would this be even faster then the “big disk extremes”.
I’ve read that G-RAID currently makes the fastest hardrives at the under $1000 dollar price point. -
Michael,
Only the SATA drives would be faster.
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[Michael] “I’ve read that G-RAID currently makes the fastest hardrives at the under $1000 dollar price point.”
It’s not that they’re fastest harddrives, but that they utilize the same zone striping technology as their big brother, Medea. Medea’s are famous for holding their speed as they fill up. G-RAID’s are doing the same.
LaCie now has a set of SATA drives which I was supposed to test for a review, but business got too crazy here so I never did the test.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.comNow in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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What type of video are you working with?
If you are just doing DV, which has a whopping data rate of ~3.5MB/sec, a single FW800 drive should be able to support enough tracks of video that you will be forced to render before you max out the drives’ bandwidth.Striping drives carries with it certain risks – like twice the chance of failure leading to complete data loss – with each additional drive added to a volume, you add another chance of failure. With a four drive stripe you are four times as likely to have a drive die, and if a drive dies that is part of a striped volume, all the data in that volume is gone. Typically, volume and filesystem repairs are more difficult on striped drives as well.
That being said, drives seem to have become a little more reliable as of late, and OS X plus HFS+ seem to be playing very well with each other, resulting in less volume and filesystem errors than a few years ago.
Again, IF this is DV, I would suggest sticking with single drive solutions. If you are dropping frames, consider moving the drives to a firewire bus that is fully independent from the camera/deck firewire bus – i.e. get a FW800 card.
Don’t get me wrong, I love a really fast disk array as well, but unless the situation demands it, I avoid striping.
Mike
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