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Question about partitions and RAID performance
At home, I’m on a MacPro 2.66GHz 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 -
5 Replies
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Rule #1 – never capture footage to the drives your OS is located on. Same PHYSICAL drives. So Raiding the internal drives on a MacPro makes one physical Raid, yes. But then partitioning that, the OS on that AND software AND using it to capture media? That would be a big no no. And I’d NEVER run my system off a Raid 0…lose one drive, lose it all. System AND project AND media…ALL gone.
No. Install the OS on the internal drive. Get a 750GB or 1TB and partition that into 4 and install the varioius NLEs onto each, then either use the remaining three bays for editing, or get an external box. I vote for the external box, RAID 5 if you can. Don’t skimp here. You have every professional NLE under the sun on you system, get a good set of drives to work with them.
ME? I want FCP and Avid MC on my machine. But stupid Avid MC costs $5000. VERY prohibitive.
Shane
Littlefrog PostGETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD now for sale!
http://www.lfhd.net -
I believe I didn’t properly communicate my intent.
My intention was not to capture to the partitioned RAIDed internal drives; I would be capturing everything to external media drives. The internal drives would only be housing different boot systems relevant to a particular program. That way, I can update drivers and OS for FCP, without having to do so for Avid (who tend to be very slow in updating their software to be compatible with the updates in Mac OS and QT). Each drive or partition would only have the OS and software suite for a program. In other words:
Partition 1: OSX and FCS2
Partition 2: OSX and Avid Xpress Pro Studio Toolkit
Partition 3: OSX and Adobe CS3 Production Suite
Partition 4: Media100 or possibly BootCamp w/ WidowsXPSince I wouldn’t be housing any of the media on the internal drives, and I always and regularly back up my projects to an external drive, wouldn’t that be pretty safe? If things crashed, I would only have to re-install the software and copy the project back over. Would it be possible to RAID1 or RAID5 four internal drives and then partition it so that each of the three or four suite partitions had a mirrored redundancy?
I guess the big question is whether or not I will even see a performance gain running OSX and the various NLEs on RAIDed partitions vs. just having three or four completely independent drives? If not, then it’s all pretty moot.
Thanks.
Trip Gould
Editor – Composer – Professor -
p.s.
By the way, I just got through your “Getting Organized…” Master Series and I really enjoyed. Thanks for putting together a very useful series.Trip Gould
Editor – Composer – Professor -
There is no real point in setting up your internal drives as a Raid just to run the OS and various NLEs. There would be little if any gain in terms of performance in the software as the standard drive set up does it quite happily. Its the external media drives that you want to optimise in terms of speed and as suggested Raid 5 is probably the best option in terms of speed and redundancy.
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Hi Venture…a bit late with this suggestion, but only just come across this post searching archives…
One thing that could speed up your apps is to get a Raptor drive for your system drive 10,000rpm or 15k Cheetah and do what was suggested with the partitioning…though they are expensive and capacities are quite small compared with 7,200rpm drives. You might have to buy 4 x separate drives. That would mean 4 x OS installs though unfortunately.
Worth a look…
*Production Studio Premium CS2 / *Combustion 3 / Mocha v1
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