RAID 5 with SSD and HDD

[Fred Jodry]

Rex, you could try this:
Back up your data on borrowed storage.
Make one of your existing 3 Western Digital half- terrabyte hard drives your boot hard drive; you can make “folders” on it too, import your daily or project data on this temporary folder, then delete it fully when through, and make a new folder for the next project.
Your other two half- terrabyte Western Digitals are spare or shelf data storage awaiting the day when you have enough money to buy/ make a tape backup system.
Take your existing hard drive controller whether internal or external, Active Storage Inc., Maxx Digital, or Small Tree etc. and just replace the 3 Western Digitals with good SLC SSD “hard” drives, probably RAID 0 is just fine with SLC SSD, and watch your controller speed and editing renders speed up through the roof. Even if you can`t figure out how to make RAID configurations right away, j.b.o.d. on SSDs will give you nice speed, a plus. It`s no harm flattering your customers and controller manufacturers alike with data size changing renders, like into and out of H.264.
To continue, when I looked at my e- mail this morning there was a web attachment showing that the new 6 GB per second data SSDs from my favorite vendor are now just about in line in price and practicality with their 3 GB per second line. If you try looking at 120 GB size drives first then look only a little bigger or smaller in GB sizes then you`ll find good practical considerations and parameters like price, without your eyeballs falling out of your head from fatigue.
Fred Jodry

RAID 5 with SSD and HDD by, Rex Polanis on Nov 26, 2011 at 3:49:07 pm

I have never set up a RAID before. Lately my editing needs require a speed boost and I don’t have a lot of money to build a whole new sytem. I am considering replacing my current HDD boot drive with a SSD boot drive and then combine the old boot drive with my additional drives to RAID 5. My current system setup is as follows:

AMD Athlon 64 Dual Core 3.21 ghtz
Asus Motherboard
3 WD 500gb HDDs
Windows 7 64
Sony Vegas Pro 11
Adobe CS5.5 MS
BCC 7

Would setting up my system up as a RAID 5 with a SSD as my main boot drive and three HDDs in RAID 5 work? Would it speed up, say rendering H.264 to mpeg2 and avc? Also, would it improve preview editing? Thank you.

One man with courage makes a majority.

Canon 7D Sony Vegas Pro 11 Adobe CS5.5 Master Suite