Suggestions for setting up a RAID 5 on a macpro

[David Roth weiss]

Steve,

Setting up a homemade Raid-5 can be done, but its never as easy, as safe or as reliable as buying one setup from a manufacturer. I strongly suggest that you should not expect to be able to order the right parts, assemble them and fully master the art of raid-5 perfectly in one week’s time.

Raid-5 is all about safety, and if you are not fully able to test and retest your homemade solution, your raid-5 setup could very easily be far less safe than any raid-0 zero solution.

If your heart is dead set on the mission, check out the the solutions that are tested on AMUG such as the one Scott Thomas discusses in his Cow post at https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/8/983651

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Jared Picune]

Steve,

I would recommend going with the CalDigit RAID Card. Frankly it’s only $549, and will make your life much easier.

It’s 100% hardware RAID, which is very important, bootable, and you can migrate your data. Which sounds like it will be important to you. Also you can expand up to 16 total drives.

https://www.CalDigit.com/RAIDCard/

Check it out If you have any additional question I’ll be happy to help you out over on the CalDigit Forum.

https://forums.creativecow.net/forum/caldigit

Also to answer your question about parody. With RAID 5 use this formula: Subtract 1 drive. Very easy.

Jared Picune
Idea Spring Editing, Inc.
Denver Final Cut Pro UG
Geeky Mac | FCP Tips & Tricks

[Sean Oneil]

Steve,

What is your current JBOD tower plugged into? Is is a hardware RAID controller?

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

David,

That’s great advice for someone who hasn’t bought anything yet. But he already has four 1TB drives and an external enclosure set up. And his controller card might already support RAID-5 (he didn’t say what he was using). It would be a huge waste of time and money not to use his existing equipment.

RAID-5 isn’t tricky to set up or anything. On just about any controller all you need to do is pick the block size (just like in RAID-0) and make sure write caching is enabled.

Sean

[David Roth weiss]

Sean,

There were a few things Steve said in his original post that concerned me and I simply didn’t want to him jump into something over his head that could potentially create more problems than it solved. Raid-5 that doesn’t work as expected has none of the benefits of Raid-0 and instills a false sense of security that can be devastating.

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Roth Weiss] “Setting up a homemade Raid-5 can be done, but its never as easy, as safe or as reliable as buying one setup from a manufacturer.”

I would highly recommend this as well because if something goes wrong, well then you have to figure out what’s wrong. If you purchase a pre-built RAID 5 from a manufacturer then you get tech support to assist with installation and any issues that might arise.

Storage is one place I never build my own solutions, I always purchase pre-built and it has paid great dividends over the years with tech support.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[David Roth weiss]

[walter biscardi] “Storage is one place I never build my own solutions, I always purchase pre-built and it has paid great dividends over the years with tech support.”

I have no problem building Raid-0 arrays because you don’t expect them to be mission critical, but Raid-5 really has to be mission critical.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Steve Heffner]

Thanks everyone, thus far.

Sean,

Yes, the editor told me the tower is plugged into a controller. I want to see it for myself so I’m going down there today. I am not sure what controller it is so I will find out and post.

He’s saying stuff like,”all we’ll have to do is jut format the RAID” but to me nothings is ever that simple and since I haven’t done this before and I’m the assistant, I’m just being cautious and anal retentive and want to have as much info as I can so I can ask HIM questions and give some directives so we don’t end up with a potential catastrophe.

He’s working with HDV footage and we will always have our tapeless footage backups backed up (and master tapes) in case of a major failure or something.

So, if the controller is set then I’m assuming we could just set the raid up through the controller and he’s good to go?

Steve

[Steve Heffner]

Jared,
Thanks and will do.

Steve

[Sean Oneil]

If it’s a hardware RAID card and it supports RAID-5, yes, that’s all you need to do.

But if this was software RAID, done in disk utility, then you cannot do RAID-5. There is no software RAID-5 for a Mac.

Sean