New Mac! How should I configure drives?

[David Roth weiss]

[Michael Jones] “Does having all 4 drives working off that card cause issues? Is their a way to separate the system drive? Does that even matter? If it is a RAID card, why is it controlling (or should it be) the system drive?”

Don’t sweat the details of the card, it’s able to run all four drives striped together, independently, or any permutation of the above. Just stripe the ones you want as your media drives as Raid-0 and you’ll get very good performance, which you’ll appreciate very much when doing your work. The redundancy thing is cool if you or your boss have a spare $6000 lying around, until then, stick with performance.

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

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

[Kris Anderson]

The Apple Raid card has a battery powered cache. Once the battery is fully charged (72 hours) you will have your 240mb/s speeds. When the battery is low or empty it will drop off to about 50mb/s.

And yes, Raid 0 for me.

MacPro 8 core 3ghz – 8gig RAM – Mac OS 10.4.11
2.5tb internal RAID on Apple Raid Card
+ AJA Kona 3 + Sonnet External RAID

[Sevan Matossian]

UH OH…

I am so glad I found this thread. I wish I would have found it 2 days ago..

I have a brand new mac pro.. nearly loaded…

Used the raid utility at the start up to make it a 4 x 1TB Raid 05 configuration. (2.4TB)

Exactly what y’all said not to do.

What are my options?

Should I start all over?

Can I re-configure without losing data?

I think I will go with the 1 drive for Start up + applications

And raid the other 3 drives for the video editing. Raid 0 (correct?)

any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Is there a step by step tutorial on how to raid the drives from start up to one of these perfect scenarios for editing stations?

cheers
sevan

[Michael Jones]

Yes, I highly recommend that you Isolate 3 of the 4 drives as a Raid 5 or Raid 0 (0 is for higher speed but no redundancy)… while first reserving one of the four drives (Bay 1) as a dedicated system/apps drive. Did you get the Apple Raid Card? A controller card is much faster than a software raid. Also, when you break up the current raid, you will most likely loose your data.