Just starting and need some aid!

[Lobotany Pictures]

I've just started my own company so I am pretty new and I'm not sure what is best. I need to purchase an external enclosure that I will edit HD footage off of. I use an iMac so I am limited to FW800. I have been looking at the following options:

OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Dual Bay
or
OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro

Do I keep these as my working drives and then copy my data off of these drives to archive? (onto a usb drive or even a naked drive?)
Do I want these to be in RAID 1, RAID 0 or JBOD?

 

[nyvideo]

I can't offer any information on using the FW800 for your editing data, though it would seem that your internal drive on the iMac has a much faster (system) bus. That said, though, with FCP I think it's recommended not to store data and your program on the same drive.

Regarding your RAID options, you may want to consider how much data you'll be accumulating and how you're going to back it up.

JBOD provides no data redundancy. If your drive crashes or gets corrupted you're screwed.

RAID 0 is pretty much the same thing. The differences as I understand it have to do with disk spanning, so you can make two or more drives look like one.

RAID 1 gives you redundancy by writing to the two drives simultaneously. This provides good protection, but may be slower than other RAID units.

You ought to consider something else that can give data redundancy like RAID-5, too. See what the costs are and the advantages in space and expandability.

Remember that RAID is not a back-up. When you're working on data that can't be lost (by a hard drive crash, a fire, or some other catastrophe), you must include some way to back up your RAID unit.

Good luck.