Internal RAID0 on Mac Pro (2010) (Video)

[Bob Zelin]

as long as you don’t have the “Apple RAID card” which was a piece of junk, you can simply stick your 4 drives into your Mac Pro and go to work. If you simply use the Apple Disk Utility to create a RAID 0, just remember that all drive today, including Western Digital Blacks, have a high failure rate, and you risk losing your media – so make sure to back up. The more drives in your RAID 0, the more risk you have of losing more media – but of course, with the RAID 0 on multiple drives, you get better performance.

Nothing wrong with your 2010 5,1 Mac Pro.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Jesse Hayward]

Thanks, Bob!

Would running 2 RAID 0s as “In” and “Out” RAIDs for rendering be a good idea? Also, do you mean that drives today have a higher failure rate than previous gens, or that they are just as unreliable as ever? Thankfully, I am already pretty paranoid!

Am I going to see a bottleneck at all just running the 4 disks JBOD?

Jesse

[Bob Zelin]

you must live your life paranoid. You should go to sleep every night, with a sick feeling in your stomach – “will my media be there tomorrow morning – will by boss fire me – will my clients never use me ever again”. If you don’t live your life this way (destined to have ulcer surgery one day), then you don’t belong in the video business.

You seem determined to use your FREE WD Caviar Black drives in the most efficient way, so that you dont’ have to spend one penny. what can I say. The more drives you have running in a RAID 0, the better the speed you will get. But the greater the risk that you have of losing your data. Want better piece of mind – buy an external drive array, that will cost you MONEY. Want to spend less – run on single drives, and back up. Want to have good performance, and still have piece of mind – BACK UP.
there are no miracle answers. You backup or one day, you will lose your media. This applies to everyone on Creative Cow. There is no “what is the best thing I can buy, so that I never have to worry about this” – the answer is NOTHING. You MUST back up to something, or one day, you will be screwed.

Bob zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[M. Venom]

You can keep the Cache on your Export drive, firewire 800 is going to cause a bottleneck on your system. In Past Experience Hitachi drives have been known to die pretty awful deaths, As for the Western Digital Blacks, they are fast and reliable but only work with RAID if they are the older models, newer firmware on the WD Blacks are know for drop outs and disk failure when in the RAID Configuration, this is b/c WD has released their REDS which are specially for RAID and NAS Applications (google WD Blacks in RAID it will confirm). For Maximum Output I would sell all the drives and Get SSDs (triple the speed of WD Blacks), they are really cheap now for my raid drives, would increase the airflow in you Mac Pro so less heat, processor and graphic card fan noise and then a 4tb Western digital $99 at Microcenter for backup.

“Do Not Under Estimate the Power of The Darkside

[Jesse Hayward]

Bob, thanks for the advice. I always appreciate advice based on professional experience. Maybe video isn’t for me, don’t have much of a choice, though, because I work for my Dad and have no backbone.

Thanks for the reply, Venom.

I really like this machine. Contrary to what Bob thinks I have implied, I will spend a ton of money for a quality build (otherwise I would have built a hackintosh long ago). As soon as I get this disk situation figured out I am planning to get a Quadro 4k and maybe even 48GB of RAM. Although, it seems like maybe I should hold off because I apparently have a knack of getting the wrong hardware.

With a little research it seems that these blacks will sell for like 30-50 bucks each. I guess for that price I would rather keep them and throw them in my old Mac Pro or Xserve or something. I have read (perhaps incorrectly/from bad sources) that the Mac Pro’s internal RAID controller doesn’t work with multiple SSDs. Is this the case?

Jesse