Best use of RAID drives?

[filmguy123]

I have two 300gb HD's that I want to RAID together for my edit system. Not sure which drive to make them though... would they be best as:

Boot drive
Project drive (project files, captured source footage, assets, etc.)
Scratch drive for preview files, etc.


Where will I see the most benefit?

[Axel Segebrecht]

Hey filmguy123, I would suggest RAID 0 (striping) and use for both projects and scratch. Although I'd probably get another 300 HD and go RAID 5 (security/speed balance). RAID 0 is fast but you have absolutely no redundancy!

[Nathaniel McInnes]

if you could get 2 more HDs, you could do raid 10 (0+1) You have stripping so intotal you have 600gb usable, but when you raid 1 them, you also get reduncacy. I would just get two big fat 750GB and Raid 1 them

[Axel Segebrecht]

PCGuide have a nice matrix to compare RAID levels (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/comp-c.html).
I'd go for 5 because you get more usable disk space and good performance.

[filmguy123]

reading about RAID 5, it sounds like the performance loss is largely in the data writing department, and as such wasn't best suited for video/film streaming & editing?


Is it possible to do a RAID 0+1 where I could raid together the 2x300gb and then have that mirroed to a single 750gb drive? (so RAID 0 performance + redundancy to the "invisible" 750gb drive?)... that would be neato.

[Nathaniel McInnes]

Hi. If you are doing video editing raid 1 is for you. We used to do that with 2 x 500GB hard drives in all our macs before we moved to the Apple Xraid. We now have 5TB using Raid 0+1.

Thanks,

[Jeff Anderson]

Raid 0. Go for speed and use them as dedicated video only drives. I keep my projects and scratch on the same drive and program files seperate. Get some sort of external hard drive and backup your video drive nightly. I actually use two and rotate them out so one is with me in the even the office burns down or something...

I prefer to have the external backup instead of the mirror for speed mainly, but its also nice to have a backup when you delete the wrong file or screw yourself in any other way :)

[filmguy123]

Is it possible to do a RAID 0+1 where I could raid together the 2x300gb and then have that mirroed to a single 750gb drive? (so RAID 0 performance + redundancy to the "invisible" 750gb drive?)

So it's basically what jdajda said, no performance loss, except I don't need to backup nightly because the MIRROR takes care of that? (ie one 750gb drive is enough to mirror the 2x300gb drives in RAID 0, so it's a 3 drive RAID, 2 drives striped and then those two drives mirrored to a 750gb)...

Is this possible? Is this a RAID 0+1 or what?

[Axel Segebrecht]

Is this possible? Is this a RAID 0+1 or what?

Yes. No, it's RAID 0 but you have to manually "mirror". What you are looking for is 0+1. You will need four equally sized disks for that work (well, two equal ones for striping and two for the mirroring). RAID 10 is 1+0 (mirroring + striping) and creates a striped set from of mirrored drives.

[filmguy123]

how do you manually mirror?

[Jeff Anderson]

wont the mirroring slow you down?

[Axel Segebrecht]

how do you manually mirror?

Simply copy-n-paste :-)