Best cheapest raid system solution for mac pro

[Jason Porthouse]

Hi Rob,

Sorry for the tardiness of my reply, spent Easter working in a field with lots of horses and little internet.

Yes, the drives absolutely need to be the same capacity, and ideally the same brand – but the last isn’t a deal breaker as long as they’re all the same spec (ie 7200rpm, X amount of cache). Deviation from this MAY incur problems and erratic behaviour…

If you can’t get them to match – consider 3 new drives, and relegate your old one to backup purposes. Worth the extra hundred or so bucks for peace of mind…

Jason

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Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Neil Sadwelkar]

For a RAID0, if all the drives are identical – brand, model, age – it’s best. Their spin up/down and latencies match and the RAID actually works faster.

Depending on the resolution and compression you’re working on, you may not even need a RAID0 in the first place. Today’s SATA 7200 rpm drives are plenty fast for HD up to Apple ProResHQ. It’s only when you need many streams of Apple ProResHQ simultaneously, that you actually see some benefit of a multiple-drive RAID.

If your original media is AVCHD, or Canon video, then those are pretty small files. You can back them up to many Blu-ray disks. Each Blu-ray disk costing a few dollars, can hold about an hour worth of Canon files, and many hours of AVCHD. If you transcode with Compressor and save the batch along with the original compressed camera originals, you can get back identical ProRes files in a hurry.

And you can backup the the ProRes transcodes to bare SATA drives which you load with a dock. Should the backup drive fail, you still have the Blu-ray which only needs transcoding, the parameters for which are saved along with the target folder as well.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Jeff Breuer]

We have a very similar set up where I work. 3 internal Raided (identical) hard drives, back up through esata and and a dock for internal drives that we use for archiving (w/ anti-static bags). In terms of workflow, I agree with everyone here – it works well.

Although it’s been reliable for us, it has been a bit slow at times. I might click away from FCP and then back or open a finder window and the computer will stop and think for a while till I hear the Hard Drives wind up and click over. I noticed though that this system’s internal RAID was set up as RAID 2. I don’t know much about RAID, but could that be the problem?

thanks.

Jeff

[Rob Fourchalk]

Thanks Jason – Yeah I just purchased a couple of these https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Hitachi/0S02861/ to go along with my 2tb apple stocked hard drive. Didn’t check before to make sure the cache was the same as these ones are 64mb. I think the apple’s may be 32mb come to think of it. Think I’ll have problems as you suggested?

Thanks again….

[Jason Porthouse]

[Rob Fourchalk] “Think I’ll have problems as you suggested?”

Dunno Rob, try it and see. I doubt it will do anything nasty – you just never know. If it does seem to be problematic, buy another drive and relegate the internal one to external backup duties… you’ll need this anyway!!

All the best

Jason

_________________________________

Before you criticise a man, walk a mile in his shoes.
Then when you do criticise him, you’ll be a mile away. And have his shoes.

*the artist formally known as Jaymags*

[Rob Fourchalk]

Thanks Jason – just hooked up a couple of 2tb drives (exact same ones) together raided at 0 and using my other 2tb (different drive) as backup. No problems to report and quite fast (for me anyway).

Thanks again for all feedback.

[Tad Newberry]

a couple more questions here, but so far it sounds like we’re all on the same page.

#1 – this seems like a no-brainer, but will FCP operate best (with ProRes HD video clips) if my 2-drive internal RAID uses 7200 rpm drives instead of 5400?

#2 – how much faster would it be if i added a third drive to my RAID?

#3 – what is SATA 6? Will my MacPro utilize it as is, or do i need something else?

#4 – anti-static bags? Are they really needed for shelving/storage? Of course sure they can’t hurt, and i am definitely keeping all original packaging now that i’m moving into having more drives for archiving and storage, but just wondering if the two drives i have sitting on my shelf with no bags are in danger?

#5 – Norton/McAfee? i never used it until a month ago, just before i did my full reinstall and have not put it back on. Me no likey…but do any of you guys find a need for it?

#6 – screensavers? I recall a couple years ago with FCP, it was recommended to never use a screen saver. Still the same?

My system at this point:

internal bay 1 – system drive, partitioned as per David great new tutorial (prepping for Lion and FCP X). This drive has OS, all applications, and autosave of all project (FCP and Motion) files. Backed up weekly – incremental backup via Carbon Copy – to external USB drive, via the Black Widow 2-drive caddy. Also, the clean install was cloned and shelved to another drive as well.

bay 2 & 3 – (2) 1.5TB Seagate 5400 drives, RAID 0 for 3TB total. All video clips – MOSTLY HD Pro Res conversions from my Sony NX5 originals (the originals i back up to BluRay as soon as i’m done shooting. Oddly, FCP Log & Transfer is pretty flakey on when it chooses to recognize valid media from my NX5, so i use ClipWrap which is very consistent).

bay 4 – all project files, and i used to have pretty much all media except video here (images, sound library, etc.), but i will be moving all that to the RAID as this seems to be the thing to do. This drive has also become a sort of default long-term storage for other seldom-used files (projects, templates, stock footage, etc.). Because of the project files, this one is backed up daily to an external USB drive.
I like to backup as much stuff as possible to BluRay discs.

Project file organization: i like to create a folder for each new client project. If i end up with more than file of a certain kind, i make a subfolder for each type (“Images”, “FCP Projects”, “Motion Projects”, “DVD Studio Projects”, “Sound”, etc.). When i’m done with the client project, i back up this main client folder to DVD or BluRay(s), however it fits, then delete it from the drive(s). The only thing i don’t archive (unless it is a small project) is the ProRes files that were converted from the camera originals. Too big and too many!

Though i don’t miss the image quality, there was something simple and beautiful about ye olde BetaSP tape days… : )

thanks for helping out a bonehead!
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FCS3
2.66 GHz Quad-Core Mac Pro
6GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GT 120
…and a few TeraBytes o’ storage
(then it’s on to PetaBytes, ExaBytes and MosquitoBytes!)