Which Raid type for FCPX

[Andrew Richards]

First of all, what RAID card did you get? The features vary and it will help in making a recommendation.

If you are opting to copy your media into events on ingest, you want performance. You can get that with a RAID-0, but any drive failure will kill all your data, so you want to be backing that up. RAID-10 is only possible with at least 4 disks, so to use that you’d need to put your boot drive elsewhere (like on an SSD in your unused second optical bay, highly recommended!). If your card supports it, you should use RAID-5. It allows one disk in the set to fail without killing the data. One of the disks in the set is consumed for parity data (which is what allows the set to tolerate the loss of one disk).

So with your 1TB drives, you could have:
RAID-0 = 3TB volume, unprotected against drive loss, highest performance
RAID-5 = 2TB volume, fault tolerant of one drive loss, better performance
RAID-10 = 2TB volume, requires one more 1TB drive to create, highest performance with fault tolerance

Note if you add one more drive to the RAID-5 above, the volume will be 3TB and will have higher performance than it would with three drives. Like the RAID-10, this would require a 5th disk for boot service.

Assuming your card supports it, I’d do a RAID-5. Just know that if you ever get a message that your RAID set is degraded or has lost a disk, replace it IMMEDIATELY so the card can rebuild the RAID-5 and restore fault tolerance. Running a RAID-5 with a bad disk in the set is just as dangerous as RAID-0. Depending on what card you have, you may be able to continue working while the card rebuilds the array.

Best,
Andy

[J. hunter Allred]

To add to that, if you don’t back up to other media, I’d consider 4 drives, 3 in raid 5, and last as a hot spare.

Personally, I’d get one 3TB drive, raid5 together your 3 1TB drives, and use the 3TB as a timemachine volume. Then you’re somewhat protect from file deletions, corruptions, alterations, etc, in addition to plain old disk failure

[Thomas Frank]

Well at the moment there are only 3 Drives in the Mac Pro so I will use one for the OS which will only give me 2T together to play with for FCPX. Not sure why I would use any for TimeMachine since I would like use them for FCPX.
I do have to say I have a 2TB G-Raid FW800, 500 GB G-Drive FW800 and a 3TB (I think) G-Safe also over FW800.

So Andrew your saying not use the OS on separate 1TB drive but merge them all together?
I always thought that is no good for Editing Video?

[Chris Good]

Another thing to consider. If you have a RAID setup where you have mirrored drives, like in RAID10 (for example, 2 pairs of striped drives that are mirrored) – this could potentially be a bad choice for any sort of media production. If you have corrupted files on one striped pair, you also have it on the mirror. Or if you delete something that for some reason you are unable to undo, it’s also gone on the mirror.

On one of my Mac Pros I have 4 drives in it. A 500gb OS drive, 2 x 1TB drives striped together into 2TB, and a 2TB drive that syncs with the striped pair every night as a backup. This way if some video file or photo gets corrupted or deleted… I still have yesterday’s version on the backup. If I lose a drive, I could potentially lose a whole day’s worth of work, but it’s better than losing a project or file completely.