-
Optimal Hard Drive Configuration
-
Alex – Thanks for the reply. Yes, I’m thinking external drives. I have FW800 (preferable over my Mac’s USB2), but would consider a controller card if that makes sense or is mandatory for RAID 5. To be honest, I’m confused between RAID 5 and RAID 3, and have to study this further.
My main interest is getting better throughput for editing in CS6 Premiere Pro. I have a Mac Pro 5,1 tower, 32GB RAM and 4 internal drives (system + apps, work files, scratch disk and time machine backup).
RE: What interface do you need it to have? USB 3.0, eSATA, FW800 are the usual suspects.
Speed requirements?
Probability of failure / data loss: RAID5 sets do fail, especially with high capacity desktop drive due to the infamous “URE on rebuild” problem but they’re in general more reliable than RAID0 sets. What I am trying to say is that it’s reasonable to expect nearly any RAID5 set to lose at least some data over its lifetime, when using high capacity desktop drives. So use it with caution and back up your data.
-
[David Patterson] “confused between RAID 5 and RAID 3”
It is confusing, and some people still use it, yet RAID3 basically a dinosaur from a decade ago. Among parity RAIDs, it’s RAID5 for under six drives, RAID6 for six or more. RAID1 or 10 can also be used in certain scenarios, rarely in video though due to low space efficiency.
You can get a decent ATTO or Areca RAID controller ($500-900) but it’s an overkill for four-five internal drives. The box I linked above is a good balance between cost, capacity and performance.
If you need performance first, just use OS striping to make a RAID0 array on your internal drives. You’ll get around 500MB/s (on a four-drive RAID0) – something not easily achievable with external boxes unless you spend at least $1.5K more. Do backups of course.
-
Here’s what I got going on and it works pretty well for 4k in premiere:
SSD: OS & Software
4×7200 HDD in Raid 10: Projects and Assets
SSD: Cache Files
SSD: Scratch & Output
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up