Hard drive setup

[Jon Doughtie]

I am guessing – you are trying to make use of drives you already have. You want to avoid spending money on new drives.

But eight drives? Even if you have a big enough box, you are going to produce an impressive amount of heat, and tax your power supply, more than likely.

I’d put four drives together for projects/media in RAID5. If you lose a drive, you can replace and the array will rebuild. No data loss.

But even then, you need a workstation with a solid power supply/internal infrastructure to start building up something like this.

System:
Dell Precision T7600 (x2)
Win 7 64-bit
32GB RAM
Adobe CC 2015.02 (as of 6/2016)
256GB SSD system drive
4 internal media drives RAID 5
Typically cutting short form from HD MP4 and P2 MXF.

[Gabe Schimmel]

Thanks for responding John- I’d totally do raid 5 if I could afford it, but as far as I can tell those cards cost at least $100 and I don’t wanna spend quite that much.

I’m building in the mastercase 5 from cooler master and have bought a couple of high static pressure fans for my front intake, so hopefully I’ll be able to keep all that heat under control.

My other question about the 4 SSD’s being grouped together or split into pairs stems from this article (https://ppbm7.com/index.php/tweakers-page/84-disk-setup/95-disk-setup) which says that “The reason for only two volumes in the case of 5 disks or more, is purely based on ease of use. The parity raids are fast enough to handle the half-duplex limitations and make it easier to use only two drive letters, instead of a whole bunch of letters for different volumes.”

So I guess what I’m asking is if 4 SSD’s in raid 0 will function essentially the same as 4 SSD’s in raid 5 minus the redundancy, which would allow me to store all my scratch files in one place and simplify my setup.

Thank you!!