[Brian Reisdorf]

You mostly nailed it with your assumptions, but ultimately the value of a RAID is largely dependent on just what your specific “real world scenario” is.

Quadrupling your read and write speeds doesn’t seem like a major upside if you’re working with a couple streams of H264, but if you’re given significantly larger resolution footage, or footage with extreme color depth, both require much higher bandwidth for the same common editing tasks. That combination of increased bandwidth and massive capacity becomes more of a basic requirement the further up the “quality ladder” that your footage goes. Perhaps most importantly traditional RAIDs keep those gains fairly inexpensive compared to SSDs AND add a layer of drive-failure protection on top of that. All those things considered makes them must-have’s for most production companies.

Like any kind of tech, it comes down to considering the benefits to your actual workflow and whether those advantages are worth the investment, but for most pro’s a solid direct-attach RAID is one of the first major upgrades worth spending real money on, often for the protection factor alone.

ProMAX Systems
VP of Technical Services