Final Cut Pro and Video Hard Drive/RAID

[Shane Ross]

Adding a RAID to your computer is cheaper and easy. Adding a networked, shared storage RAID…a bit more complex, and a quite a bit more money.

Firstly, you have a MacPro, no? So you have several hard drive bays. The first one is occupied by the system drive…the second sounds like it has a drive in it already. That leaves two more bays open. Just get a couple 2-3 TB drives, put them in there, and using Disk Utility, Stripe them as RAID 0 for speed.

An external RAID solution, for a computer as old as yours…hmmm. Because you’ll need something faster than Firewire 800, for sure. You’ll need eSATA, or a RAID that requires a SAS card, or Fibre card…or an Ethernet connection. Those are getting rare these days, except for the Ethernet solutions. But those ones mainly are shared RAIDS, which is what you are looking for.

Google Small Tree Communications…they offer these solutions.

Shane
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[Dallas Kruse]

I do have a Mac Pro (2012 model) but all my SATA bays are taken up by other drives.

I was looking into a 4TB RAID

https://www.amazon.com/Book-dual-drive-high-speed-premium-storage/dp/B00KU68A1A/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1432305944&sr=8-1&keywords=4TB+RAID

but wondering if the USB speed is fast enough (or even if I have USB 3 on my Mac Pro).

If i HAVE to get an eSATA PCI card, i have PCI slots available.

Given I can’t use my internal SATA drive slots, any suggestions?

My goal is to be able to Multi-Clip edit up to 4-6 cameras/files.

Music Producer dabbling in Video.
FCP 7. Adobe CS6.
Canon T3i.

[Shane Ross]

[dallas kruse] “but wondering if the USB speed is fast enough”

It isn’t. Even USB3…that’s barely over FW800 speed.

[dallas kruse] “(or even if I have USB 3 on my Mac Pro).”

You don’t. Sorry, that only is available on newer macs.

THIS:

https://www.caldigit.com/VR2/

Combined with this:

https://www.caldigit.com/FASTA-6GU3pro/

Should do you good.

Shane
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[Dallas Kruse]

Shane,

thank you so much for the info. I’ll do some saving up and make some purchases.

Music Producer dabbling in Video.
FCP 7. Adobe CS6.
Canon T3i.

[Dallas Kruse]

Since I don’t have Thunderbolt on my Mac Pro, would it be possible to get a Thunderbolt PCI card and run a Thunderbolt RAID for faster speeds than an eSATA RAID?

I’m not TOO familiar with PCI speeds, so please excuse my ignorance.

Also, are the specs on the VR2 fast enough to edit Multi-Clips (2-5 camera angles or 1980×1020 ProRes files)?

My Mac Pro specs are:
2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
24 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card
OSX 10.9.5
Built circa 2008.

Music Producer dabbling in Video.
FCP 7. Adobe CS6.
Canon T3i.

[Shane Ross]

[dallas kruse] “Since I don’t have Thunderbolt on my Mac Pro, would it be possible to get a Thunderbolt PCI card and run a Thunderbolt RAID for faster speeds than an eSATA RAID?”

Alas, no. They do not make Thunderbolt PCIe cards for Macs…only for PCs.

[dallas kruse] “Also, are the specs on the VR2 fast enough to edit Multi-Clips (2-5 camera angles or 1980×1020 ProRes files)?”

2-3…yes. 4-5…might be on the edge. The best bet for that are options they no longer make…MiniSAS connectors and an HDOne 8 drive RAID.

https://www.caldigit.com/HDOne/

This stuff is discontinued because it’s too old. You might be able to find one used, but even then…

Yeah, Thunderbolt would be better than that even, but Thunderbolt isn’t an option. Your machine is getting too old to have current options available to it. And to sink $2000+ into a solution that does work, is throwing money at old technology to work on an aging computer.

Shane
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