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FCP scratch disk questions
Is this a good layout for a scratch disk for Final cut pro? Mac pro with four hard drive bays. Put the system drive in hard drive bay 1 with the OS applications and everything else on hard drive 1. Then put three 1.5 tb hard drives in slots 2-4 and raid 0 them together to form a 4.5 tb partition. All drives will be 7200 rpm. This way final cut pro is writing to another disks or disks other than the system hard drive. Is this a smart setup???
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5 Replies
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It’ll work fine. But make sure you back up the RAID externally as you have no protection with RAID 0. You can format RAID 5 with 3 drives. That’s be a safer approach.
John
MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.2, Motion 4.0.2, Comp 3.5.2, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.2)Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN
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But you can’t do RAID 5 without a RAID card in the machine. For most people, your RAID 0 approach is fine – you could use something like Retrospect to do incremental backups externally to a slower array, or get something better external that does RAID 5 via eSata, giving similar speed to the internal array.
As an aside, I’ve used internal arrays for years, only had one drive fail when the tower was dropped.
Edit Out Ltd
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FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producerhttps://www.blackmagic-design.com/casestudies/detail.asp?case=therydercup
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ok thanks for the response. I just have one last question. is doing what i stated above, would that be faster and have better performance than having your scratch disc to esata? To me it seems like it would be faster to do internal.
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Esata stands for external Sata, the drives inside the mac pro connect via internal sata, so the speed is theoretically the same defending on the esata card and if you are using the same number and kind of drives externally as you would be internally.
**Hindsight is always 1080p**
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You would get similar performance from a 4 disk raid 5 eSata external array as as internal 3 disk array – a little slower at around 200Mb/s – you might get 220-240 from the internal. So no real difference. The advantage is that there is no need to run a full back-up, and you can attach the storage to another system.
Interestingly, if you take the 3 internal drives you have in one Mac Pro and stick them in another, the second Mac Pro will be able to read the array (I guess Apple disk utility writes the RAID info to the drives).
In practice, eSata arrays are cheap enough that you will spend about the same on one as an internal array with an external backup.
One last thought – get an i7 iMac with the OWC eSATA modification, and save the money for the MacPro and monitor. Those things are serious bangs for bucks….
Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producerhttps://www.blackmagic-design.com/casestudies/detail.asp?case=therydercup
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