New Mac PRO Internal Raid

[OlWiseRedEye]

I recently bought 3 xtra 250gb hitachi internal hard drives to add to my mac pro. I intend to Stripe them RAID 0 and use it as the scratch disk for FCP. I was wondering if anyone here had any reccomendations as far as BLOCK size. The choices go from 16k to 256k. I want this to run as fast as possible.

[riggieri]

256K. your working with large files so you want to use a large block size

[David Saraceno]

Any reason you are striping them for DVCProHD?

[Jarek Zabczynski]

Any reason you are striping them for DVCProHD?

Why not? I do. Editing DVCProHD on a raid is much snappier than from a single disk. Heck, I run all my DV projects from a raid. If you can, do so I say.

[OlWiseRedEye]

Any reason you are striping them for DVCProHD?

It is seems uch more responsive when the info is accross the three drives. Especally when I start to fill up 1 drive. Anything that s faster is better in my opinion.

[BenB]

I do all my DVCPRO-HD editing, even multiclip editing, from an extrnal FW800 drive. Why? Cuase I used a RAID array and got no extra performance out of it. I find with my consulting clients, RAID is just overkill. Unless you're doing massive projects with massive graphics and compositing, and really doing a DVCPRO-HD "Sin City", FW800 drives are just fine.

The SATA drives internally to a Mac are even faster. With them, I honestly don't see the need for RAID in most editing shops.

[David Saraceno]

What Ben said.

[BenB]

It is seems uch more responsive when the info is accross the three drives. Especally when I start to fill up 1 drive. Anything that s faster is better in my opinion.

If you're filling up a drive, you need larger drives. FCP accessing a single drive is physically faster than accessing several. When drives fill up to capacity, they slow down. So, yes, several almost full drives can "seem" faster, but one larger drive that's not filled to capacity will in fact be faster.

I'd say get yourself one or two 500GB SATAs to install internally. When you're done with a project, archive it, don't let it sit there contributing to the slow down of your system.

Yeah, if you're filling up a dirve on a project, you simply really need to get bigger drives. Also remember that the bigger the hard drive, the faster it is.

[Cynic821]

check the frys ads. 500gb are consitantly sub 140 bucks SATA 7200

[Nik Manning]

If you are doing any type of multicam editing of DVCPRO50 footage for more than 3 angles you will need some type of raid. Multicam needs it. If you are working with dvcprohd in 1080p24 then you will definitely need it so if you plan on doing any of that then yeah raid it on up.