MacPro SATA drives

[Sean Oneil]

[Joe Stiles] “What if I added two more SATA drives in the 2nd optical bay and used 1 for my boot drive and striped the other 5 for editing? I feel confident that would work for DVCPro HD, but what about uncompressed? Are there any cooling issues involved with housing 6 SATA drives inside the MacPro?
“

I’m doing this with 5 drives (not 6). Works fine. A 5th hard drive is not going to put off more heat than a 2nd optical drive would. There really is no downside. The Mac Pro case was designed to handle this. Newer hard drives consume less power and put off less heat than they did 2 years ago.

Just keep the system disk in tray 1 or you could have problems down the road.

Sean

[Debbi Mita]

You can get the drives cheaper from third party. Apple has a whopping price list for extras. 🙂

RAID 0 – 2 drives share the content, it’s fast, but if one fails, all data is lost, requires identical size drives
RAID 1 – 2 drives share as copy, if one fails, all data can be rebuild by the other drive, requires identical size too, can be done by software or cheap RAID controllers in a fast way
RAID 10 – mixture of 1 & 0, fast, reliable, requires 4 identical drives
RAID 5 – needs at least 3 identical sized drives, total capacity is (n-1),
safe as long only one drive fails, if some day 2 drives break down, data will be completely gone.

Calculating the checksums for rebuilding requires really good and powerful hardware,
otherwise it’s really slow in writing, so for the video editing, I would count on hardware raid not software’s.

Apple has good hardware raid card, so does Caldigit.

https://www.apple.com/macpro/technology/storage.html
https://www.caldigit.com/raidcard/

As already mentioned, get larger drives, build an internal Raid 5 and have external backups
that if things happen, your loss is minimized.
Apple’s only support internal 4 drives.
If you use Caldigit’s raid card, you can utilize both 4 internal and 12 external drives. Caldigit’s is about 300 dollars cheaper and it supports RAID 6.