• Avid Media Composer

  Question about partitions and RAID performance

  Posted by Trip Gould on November 4, 2007 at 6:22 am

  At home, I’m on a MacPro 2.6GHz Quad-Core, 5GB RAM, X1900XT Graphics Card. Initially, it was a FCS2-only machine, but now I’m bringing some of my outside work home and, thus, will be adding Avid Xpress Pro to the mix (which I am very happy about, by the way… could never justify adding Avid to my home system, before, and was very sad about that). Anyway, I am going to add a second internal boot drive on which I will install Avid, as this seems to be the safest method of running both programs (and I know some people have had no problem running both on the same drive, but this method just seems cleaner). So here’s my question:

  My plan is to have a boot drive with FCS2, another boot drive with Avid Xpress w/ Studio Toolkit, and another boot drive with Adobe CS3 Production Premium…and, hopefully, a final boot drive with M100HD in the not too distant future (but that’s more of a pipe dream). Don’t ask my why I need all of those…to some it might not make sense, but for the work I’ve been doing, it does, and I prefer to stay within a product family when on a project (so when I’m cutting in FCP, I’m using Shake and Motion and Soundtrack, etc., and when I’m on the Avid, I use the Studio Toolkit, and when I’m on Premiere, I’m using After Effects, etc.); it just works better for me. If I need to go out of the family I do, of course, but only if I absolutely must. Photoshop goes on every system, of course…no alternatives there as far as I’m concerned. Anyway…

  Based on my understanding of RAID performance, the more drives the better. So, would I see any performance gain by striping for internal drives together as RAID0 and then creating four partitions from which to boot a respective system (FCS2, Avid, Adobe, etc.)? Is there a disadvantage to this? Should I just have for separate drives that are completely independent of one another and install OSX separately on each one?

  Sorry if my question is nonsensical. I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to performance enhancement, drive management, and non-standard configurations. I just know how to use the software to create what I need to for the client or for myself (though I don’t claim to be the be all and end all in the category, either).

  Thanks, in advance, for your help.

  Cheers…

  Trip Gould
  Editor – Composer – Professor

  Trip Gould replied 18 years, 6 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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