Need Unexpected Buying Advice

[Michael Sacci]

that system will scream compared to the laptop. Get what you can afford and don’t look back. (as long as it is up for the task, and this is)

[David Roth weiss]

[William Carr] “I will also get an eSATA external drive and card to gain some needed speed over my G-RAID2 FW 800 units. Total source media for this job is 475GB so one little RAID is enough for now. “

William,

Why get an external drive? The MacPro has four internal drive bays, one for the system drive and three available for a media raid. Do yourself a big favor and fill the extra three with Hitachi 750gb SATA drives ($75) and stripe them as Raid 0. The performance and storage space you gain will be well worth the few extra bucks, and you’ll be very happy you did that.

Here are the drives at Newegg: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822145166.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[William Carr]

Thanks for the advice!

About external vs. internal drives, the main reasons for external are:

1) I’ve edited for years but never went under the hood for anything, and have no idea what plugs into what in there! And I have stubby fingers.

2) This job needs about 1TB when all is said and done, and it’s part of multiple concurrent jobs. The larger encompassing project is about 5TB of material and growing, but neatly divided into 4 different series (1 series per 1.5TB external drive ought to cover this year’s doings). When it’s time to cut an episode of one of the series I just plug in that external drive and go to work.

[David Roth weiss]

[William Carr] “I’ve edited for years but never went under the hood for anything, and have no idea what plugs into what in there! And I have stubby fingers. “

So William, when you were born into this world there were lots of things you’d never done before, right? But that never held you back, did it? Had you edited video, or walked, or chewed bubble gum? NO!

So, do you have a dresser at home with drawers for clothing? Do you know how to operate the drawers? Well, There are four little drawers in the MacPro (which I’ve numbered for you below in red), and essentially all you gotta do to put a drive in is know how to work a drawer. There aren’t even any cables BTW. And, I’m sure the little drawers could care less if you have ugly fingers. If you have trouble with the little drawers someone here at the Cow will be able to offer assistance.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[William Carr]

You give me confidence, sir. It’s true, not too long ago I couldn’t imagine I’d have the skills I do now. I guess I’m always looking ahead, wishing I knew how to do more. But enough navel-gazing.

Did you say no cables in there?!? Well, that sure makes a difference.

Plus as I checked prices for externals I see how much more dollars per TB, even adding in hot-swappable drives. Cost is also a great motivator to learn stuff real fast.

If I can load up a Mac Pro with higher capacity drives than 750 each, it could provide me a more cost effective workflow, even if I have to occasionally move media content in and out from storage drives.

Thanks again for the reality check.

[Mark Raudonis]

[William Carr] “f I can load up a Mac Pro with higher capacity drives than 750 each”

We use 1 tb drives…

The 1.5 tb drives are available, but the early ones have experienced some factory “recalls”. I think you’d
be OK with 1 tbs.

Fry’s Electronics here in LA often has sales on those bare drives and they can be purchased for around $100 bucks. So for approx $500 bucks, you can have 4 tb’s of internal storage. (Raid to your liking).

Mark

[Wes Koetje]

be careful when you say hot swappable, The mac pro drives may not have cables, but they are not hot swappable. Be sure to power off the machine before swapping drives.

[Mark Suszko]

Having had the experience of losing a drive in an array set as RAID Zero, my own opinion is “never again”. I lost six month worth of work and restoring from backups was a bear.

I’ll take the performance hit versus more reliability in a RAID configuration that doesn’t go “tango uniform” and kill all your files when just one drive in the array goes bad.

[Herb Sevush]

Mark –

It’s important to realize that in Raid 0 you increase the likelihood of drive failure by the number of drives in the raid – a 3 drive raid is 300% more likely to fail than any single drive, a 4 drive raid is 400% more likely – all of which is to say I agree with you and never trust my media to anything less than raid 5(3).

Another note for William is that he should calculate the cost of buying as much ram as he can afford, and then buy 1 Gig more. It will improve both the stability and speed of FCP more than any other factor.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Michael Allen]

If you add these Hitachi 750gb SATA drives and stripe them as Raid 0, how much speed will you get? Somewhere in the area of 200MB/s?

Mike