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mac pro software raid questions
I’m setting up a mac pro for FCP and seperately ordered two hitachi SATA-II 250GB drives.
If I’m doing all DV + DVD authoring + web encoding now, and maybe some SD/HDV editing next year.
What’s the best configuration: Raid 1, 0, or no RAID and use one drives for video and the other for scratch/renders/other media?
If i bought two more 250GB drives 1) could I do a RAID-5 in software just using then mac’s own hardware
and 2) If I did would I really see much speed improvement in acttual use over two drives Raid-0’d?–Shayne
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1 Reply
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Shayne
The question is what’s more important to you – space or safety?
With 2 drives, sure the RAID 0 option is faster, but for DV/HDV work, it’s not strictly necessary – it’ll just up your ability to deal with more ‘streams’ in real-time (somewhat of a dubious benefit in day to day editing IMHO) and will improve your read/write times.
The mirrored solution RAID 1 gives you complete backup of all of your data, with those nice drive trays in the MacPro allowing you to swap out and rebuild if anything goes wrong. You could always buy two 500Gb Sata’s and get the same amount of storage as RAID 0 above. It’s a pretty failsafe solution. Even a 250Gb Raid would give you 20 hours + of HDV storage.
You need 3 or more drives for RAID 5 – although for my mind it’s a great compromise in terms of the trade off and performances losses you get from a single redundant drive. It also seems to me to be sensible in terms of the rate of failure of drives these days – pretty low really. So one out of 4 ain’t a bad deal to me. I can’t comment on speed advantages of 5 over 3 – but 5 is commonly used in video arrays, and is more commonly used full stop.
Finally – does Apple’s own disc utility DO RAID 5 or 3? It’s possible you may need some extra software, but I’m sure someone can clarify that for me. I genuinely don’t think that the speed differences between these arrays will affect your workflow. I’m not saying they’re not there – of course the read/write speeds on a RAID 0 will be twice as quick, but you only need to read/write DV streams, and render times will be more effected my the processor speed than disk access speeds.
Of course, the nice thing is that you can chop and change as and when the circumstances alter – so no harm in trying all of them, and figuring out what matter to you.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live OB operations.“The Supercar Run” now available for international distribution from http://www.electricsky.com
See you at IBC – we’re there with our FCP/replay truck…
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