Optimum Hard Drive Configuration for my Mac Pro

[DWinnie]

I am looking at adding hard drives to my mac pro, and I need advice.

Current System

8 core 2.8mhz mac pro
6 gb of Ram
320 GB Hard Drive - running Software and OS
1.5TB Seagate Barracuda - Running Project Files/Library/and Archive
an external Lacie 500gb drive for transfering files to and from the my macbook pro.

I run a small community Television station. I keep a DV quicktime of everything we do. Currently the archive is at 640gb and growing. I am adding about 100gb of finished video a month. I do keep a handful of project files, but most of it is adding titles to local school performances. Over the long term I intend to move the archive to a large mirrored raid for protection and size concerns.

In the short term, with the money I have now. I have two slots left for hard drives, and I was wondering if I would be better running...

A new 2.0 TB Caviar Green Hard drive and moving the archive over to it, so I have the 1.5TB seagate for project materials. Then I can run off the final quicktimes to this hard drive before uploading to the video server.

Or leaving the archive and final renders on the 1.5TB HD and buying two 1.0 TB caviar Blacks and using the Mac Software raid to stripe raid them for better performance with the project files and intermediate renders out of After Effects and such.

Or leaving the archive on the 1.5TB HD, buying a 1.0 TB caviar black for project files, and rendering to a raptor drive, and transfering files at the end of the day and such back to the archive.

Or buying the 2.0tb green HD for the archive, using the 1.5TB Seagate for the project files, and buying a raptor for the renders.

I am not particularly attached to the Caviar Black drives, I just read that they give a good performance. If anyone knows of a better performing drive let me know. I appreciate any advice you have to offer.

Thank you,
Don

[RyanBellaCine]

I'd look into getting one of these for your RAID. It might be more in your budget for both your long term and short term goals. You can buy the case & drives separately and piecemeal your way if needed. If you buy your drives first to place in your tower, you can then move them into this case later on. Of course I would recommend using the same drives for all slots in the RAID.

http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-OWC_QX2.html

http://eshop.macsales.com/search/QX2

[RyanBellaCine]

As far as drives for your current workflow:

My experience is that FCP isn't always using the max bandwidth of hard drives for rendering. It's limited by it's own 32bit handicap. I've got a 14TB fibercable XServe RAID to feed and I get speeds that most SATA drives can handle with FCS programs.

If you have a standard SATA drive for a scratch drive you'll be fine. We've been using LaCie FW800 drives for a while as scratch drives, keeping renders off our RAID for bandwidth & storage reasons. I've recently added an interal SATA and there wasn't much of a speed increase.

So you can use your resources more towards archive storage. I.E. buying the drives that will eventually make up your RAID now. And then move them over once you can buy the RAID enclosure.

[burning holmes]

have u used or heard of the hitachi cinemaster 1tb internal hardrive on OWC.......just wondering what your input is on that hardrive, and what type of internal hardrives would recomend to get for using in the future in a raid drive.. seagate? western digital,, and what size cache do u like , i am just using this mac pro for video editing form a panasonc ag hmc 150.

[RyanBellaCine]

I'm not familiar with that drive specifically. I tend to lean towards the largest cache size available, at least 16MB, or 32MB. Lately I've been leaning towards Seagate drives and away from Western Digital. But reviews can vary from drive model to drive model. Seagate is just as likely to put out a bad model.

The web site I've linked to previously is a good reference to check on various kinds of hardware. He also provides speed tests of the drives which is a factor for large file transfers.

http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-Drive-Hitachi2TB.html

SATA 3 is faster then what HD drives can physically deliver. Watching those details can make a difference more then following brand marketing. You might even find a better/faster drive then what WD or Hitachi markets as a "video" drive. Some of those can be marketed towards consumers with playback needs more then editing pros. Although, that kind of marketing has been common in externals.

Barefeats.com is also a great resource. They recently provided a 2TB drive review. They don't test for reliability, only speed. You would need to browse the interwebs on feedback to check for unusual fail rates for any drive.

Another good source is Newegg.com for both general reviews, feedback, and pretty good prices for drives provided you search for the specific dive model # you decide on. No matter what brand, there will be reviews of drive failures. That's just natural and why backup RAIDS are a must. But keep eyes out for the rare occasional drives that may have faulty firmware in certain batches that can cause performance issues. Those are details that can avoid unwanted headaches and lost files for reasons you can't explain.

I should add that it is wise to buy all your drives you intend to make up a RAID at once, as well as 1 or two spares per batch of 5ish.
Reasoning for buying in bulk is that you'll get drives of the same batch and technical specs. Drives of the same brand, but different model or batch numbers can have slightly different specs and read/writing habits. Since all the drives work together, you want them to match as closely as possible. And when one drive does fail, (as opposed to IF one does ) your not replacing it with a newer model of slightly different tech specs, your replacing the same exact thing so you know it should work well the the others and have a better sense of performance reliability.

We've got two XServe RAIDs made up of 14 drives each. We've actually got about 12 extras mostly because the now old & extinct Apple XServe RAIDs we got in 05 & 07 are based on PATA drives instead of SATA. Those are already out of style and quickly going out of stock everywhere. So we bought as many spares as we could at the time of purchase. We wanted to max out our capacity considering this might be our last chance to make our multi-thousand dollar RAID investment last more then 2 or 3 years longer simply because of drive failures & lack of replacement & upgraded drive availability.

There is even more complication to our story as these drives originally sold by Apple included drive sleds. Empty RAID enclosures were only filled with blanks. So that meant even more cost on our end because we had to buy extra sleds first. The only ones we found left included 400GB drives. At the time we wanted to populate the RAID with 750GB drives. The largest sized PATAs we could find. So we bought the OEM PATA drives through batches from multiple sources since no one place had enough left in stock. We made careful research to determine they were all of the same model # and replaced the 400GB sleds we bought with 750GB drives. Lucky for us we have a bunch of older LaCie externals where the 400GB drives would make a good upgrade. A few of them were put to use as desktop Time Machine volumes. Some are spares, and a few others for low-speed scratch disks.

This isn't the "recommended" way per Apple, to max out the RAID by replacing the drives themselves, but it works and we had to make due with changing times before it was too late. One "Rub" was that the 400GB RAID drives could not be reformatted via disk utility since they were recognized as a RAID formatted drive. I had to install each of them in a windows XP system to reformat them away from RAID, then back to OSX to reformat in GUID.

The moral of that story is that technology does change fast. Who knows, in two years SSDs might rule the roost and SATA HDs could be endangered. So if you didn't buy your spares now, you might be forced to spend even more to replace perfectly good SATA drives with SSDs only because you can't get SATA HDs any more to replace the one drive that failed in your RAID. Planning and foresight like this can make a big difference when dealing with limited budgets in the long run. Even though the reality that you have to spend more now feels backwards to insticts, it may save you even more money long term. And probably a few headaches and panic attacks too when you come to that sad realization when a drive fails. ;~)

[DWinnie]

Thanks for all your help Ryan. You pushed me over the edge and I am going to get the OWC Raid tower with a raid 5 configuration. My next question is which esata card do you recommend?

[RyanBellaCine]

I don't have much experience with e-Sata cards since we use Fiber & FW800. But perhaps this page will help. I keep referring to him, but he does know what he's doing.


http://macperformanceguide.com/Mac-RecommendedHardwareMacPro.html#Recommended_eSATA_C ards