RAID 5? Any takers. Advice appreciated!

[Jerry Alto]

Jeff- Why cut your storage in half by using Raid 5? What’s the downside to raid 0? So you have to redig… no big deal. If you’re doing 8-bit uncompressed you need the speed of raid 0.

We’ve done three systems now with external SATA and love it. Seri-tek (Firmtek) cards have worked very well for us. Go with the one with 4 external connectors. SATA II is close (if its not already here) so you may want to see if its available or worth waiting for. FWIW.
Jerry

G5 Dual 3GB Ram
FCP5 Studio
External 1 TB SATA Raid 0
Kona LH, Second system w AJA ioLA
Sony Z-1

[Drizzt_g]

I’m with Jerry on that one, Raid 0 is the way to go.

[Tim Vaughan]

We have the Apple Raid (RAID 5 setup) with a QLogic Fibre Sanbox and XSan, and I haven’t had any trouble working with Beta SP in SD and mini-DV projects. We absolutely MUST have my projects backed up, and the overall performance has been very good. We are not editing to HD yet, and when we reach that point, we’ll most likely get another unit and dedicate that to speed, and keeping the 1st to redundancy. But the most important thing to us is backup. (I am currently rebuilding a project that was stored on an external drive, and that drive failed. While the FCP files where backed up locally, all After FX projects are having to be rebuilt watching the copy. A real pain in the ….)
But that is just my 2 cents…..

Tim

Tim

[Jerry Alto]

Tim- We understand that backup is super important but we feel backing up on our media drives is NOT the way to go. In our case we save all the graphics and project files on an external firewire drive that is not part of the everyday system. We also output an 8-bit uncompressed quicktime movie of our 30 min. show (about 32 gigs). If there is a simple fix later on we transfer the file to the media drives, drop the file into FCP and make the fix and we’re on our way.

We have even taken it a step further. Our dub house has FCP5 and we deliver him the quicktime movie and he goes out to vhs for closed captioning then to Digibeta for our dub master.

We feel that you are asking for trouble when you mix backup files with active media files. We also understand that different workflows demand different strategies. Just sharing a workflow that has worked for us.
Jerry

G5 Dual 3GB Ram
FCP5 Studio
External 1 TB SATA Raid 0
Kona LH, Second system w AJA ioLA
Sony Z-1

[Torrey Loomis]

Jeff,

Some folks simply cannot be down for any length of time – hence the security of RAID 5 makes sense for them even if they sacrifice drive space.

For others, RAID 0 is fine because they have the time to go back to their original media.

You need to decide which side you fall on before you jump into the equipment pool.

Give me a call – I can help you on this.

Torrey Loomis
President – Silverado Systems
Apple Pro Video VAR