Do I need to go with a RAID setup? if so why?

Richard J. Johnson

Richard J. Johnson

Joystick Member
I read the defintion on wikipedia and still don't understand it fully. (maybe because I am working an 80 hour week). Does the system make the Computer render and work faster. I have a Dual G5 with FCP, CS3, Magic Bullet etc. I know it is a noob question, I just don't want to waste hard earned gas money. In need of real world advice, Any input would be appreciated.
 
Hey filthrich,

We meet again-- whowhohahaha!

Anyway the answer is no. Raid is for two things, data redundancy and speed. Fortunately for all of us SATA150 and SATA300 Drives were invented recently. And they are fast compared to drives years ago.

I'm on a PC but Mac drives are about the same. I'm running SATA150 and I have my HDV files wrapped in Cineform. I can play and edit without too much of a problem. Depending on your edit style and what you are shooting in, the MPEG file stream may be a pain to edit with, but that has nothing to do with your hard drives.

Most of the people on this board are either super pros (with budgets beyond $30K just for camera/computer equipment) or they are like you and me and use that 30K budget for everything.

What I'd encouage you to do, is get enough space to edit. Possibly 2TB (2000 Gigabytes), then if you're concerned about data redundancy buy an additonal 1TB Drive (if you don't have tapes, Using an EX1 or HVX200) and back up all of your production video clips to the 1TB and then disconnect it (the spare 1TB drive) from your computer and take it to your sister or brother's house for safe keeping. This way even if your house burns down (God forbid) you'll still have access to your footage. The likely hood that the hard drive crashes in a few months - the time it takes to edit, when bought brand new is extremely rare.

I'm using 2 Western Digital Geen Power 1TB Drives - cost $200 - $250 per drive, and have been using them for the last 6 months with no problems. Once I finish the movie, i'll "retire" them and buy new ones for the next movie, so I don't overwork them to the point of crashing.

-Also I have my College Degree in Computer Science. :Drogar-Happy(DBG):
 
What up! Thanks for the info. I have been buying internal hard drives for my mac and swapping them out for each film project. I hate to say this but I don't back up anything, but I will start as soon as I get the money up to buy the 1TB. (economy is killing me!! damn greedy oil companies)
 
Hey filthrich I have the same setup as you depending on what G5 your running. I have a G5 dual 2.0 which is a weird one in the sense that it was only offered in my configuration for a very short time. It has pcix and then they went to pci-e in a couple of months so there is much more choices available for the pci-e models as far as sata card and other cards are concerned.

One reason that you use a raid internally with the G5 is for your OS drive. I always use a two drive raid (G5 configuration) for my OS setup because you can get 15% to 20% speed increase which does make a difference. I run Firewire 800 raids externally (2 drive cases ) and some firewire 400 cases for single drives. Firewire 800 is the only way to go unless you set up a sata raid which will give you 300 to 350 megebytes a second. I run 5 terabytes externally.

Its hard to find sata cards that run this speed to fit my machine but anything with the PCI-E slots are easy to find cards for. This will let you run more video data streams at the same time. Up to 6 I believe.

I have just found this site which looks promising. http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2se4/

I have used a two drive setup raid for my OS for ten years now and have found them to be very reliable for me. The only problem is that if something goes wrong you will lose all your data if you don't back up. Its been good to me but I have been worried about it at times so I keep all my clients work on external drives which is where you video and audio files should be kept anyway. This way if you lose a OS drive you can rebuild the OS and apps and startup with all the project files and footage files right away. Hope this helps some.

Good luck.
 
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