Best RAID Solution

[DigitalNoir]

Just ordered my HMC150, and it goes without saying I am pretty excited as I am sure you all can understand. However, I'm afraid that when it gets here I'm going to run into editing problems without a RAID. I am editing on a Mac Pro Dual Quad Core (Nahelm) system with CS4 Premier (for now) and I need a good recommendation on a RAID to use. Looking for something inexpensive. So what are people using / liking? Been looking into G-RAID's and Glyphs, but what else is out there? Will FW 800 be fast enough or do i need to go eSATA?

Thanks in advance.

[David Saraceno]

If you intend to use CS4 to do RT native editing, which I wouldn't recommend, then a RAID isn't going to assist very much if at all.

If you do need a RAID, then buy two identical 500 GB 7200.11 Seagate SATAs and use the disk utility to stripe them internally.

I got 205 MB/s with that arrangement in my MacPro.

[DigitalNoir]

Alright so striping two internal drives together sounds pretty easy. Will one 1.5 TB 7200 Seagate SATA be fast enough to edit with as a scratch drive? You are also saying that it's a bad idea to try and edit the AVCHD files natively in CS4? So transcoding is gonna be a must pretty much a must no matter what?

[David Saraceno]

I'm saying the RT native editing in any NLE isn't as pleasant an experience as ingesting to a I frame editable codec.

A fast Seagate 3G SATA drive is sufficient for pro res, which I prefer.

[Allen Ellis]

I'm not exactly an expert on this (never used a RAID), but through a little logic it seems a RAID won't help in the slightest.

DVCPRO HD, which is, what, about 5 times larger than AVCHD?-- cuts like butter on my machine. Why would AVCHD (a far lower bitrate) benefit from a faster drive?

It seems if anything you need CPU horsepower to process the codec quickly.

[Skilled]

If you wish to use raid. And you are going to use a TB drive. Make sure you use this entrprise model that is designed for raid. I do this for a living.

WD1002FBYS

[Skilled]

Alright so striping two internal drives together sounds pretty easy. Will one 1.5 TB 7200 Seagate SATA be fast enough to edit with as a scratch drive? You are also saying that it's a bad idea to try and edit the AVCHD files natively in CS4? So transcoding is gonna be a must pretty much a must no matter what?

Do NOT use this drive unless you want to loose data. High failure rate!

[DigitalNoir]

Thanks Skilled, David, and Tiger for your responses so far.

So (Skilled) bottom line, it doesn't sound like i need a RAID, but after all is said and done what is a reliable drive i can get to edit off of?

[Skilled]

Well the enterprise drives are better. But in the end they are all hard drives and subject to failure sooner or later. Stick with WD for best results and use the modles with 32meg cache. I am going to be doing some experimenting in the future with SAS drives. But I also like the sata raptors...they just dont make them large enough..and they are pricy.
We were installing adobe for a customer and they recomended SCSI raid. So we are going to play with this as well. Maybe the AVCHD wotn be so juppy during edit. (Vegas no transcoding).

We shall see!

[Retrospective]

Nice Skilled! Can you recommend a good DIY RAID setup? Maybe even a RAID 1+0 !

[Skilled]

Well I like raid 0...for the speed, but in Sata...the Raptors really help. The downside is you get no redundancy. But the way I look at it is this. If you just have one drive like 95% of the people do..its the same thing. You risk loosing data if it fails.. And it will..just a matter of time.

Raid 1 will give you no performance but it does give you "some redundancy". Its not fool proof. What it does is write to two drives at the same time and gives you a copy. But wear you get screwed is in a power loss. If its writing data and you loos power it can currrupt both drives. This is why some get a battery back up on the raid controller card.

Hope this helps.

[Skilled]

O and if you want the best systems with raid go here:

www.supermicro.com (http://www.supermicro.com)

I own the company Datamicro. We are on the were to buy in North America. FL and TN locations.

[Derrick_SA]

and then there is this:

http://www.caldigit.com/HDElement/hdelement_techspecs.html

- Derrick