Raid-0 question

Steve Strickland

Steve Strickland

Well-known member
I've got a new MacPro on the way and three 500 sata drives ready to go once it arrives.

I've tried to search for answers on Raid-0 practices/opinions, but couldn't find any. Forgive me if this has already been covered.

I have been reading that Raid performance is just slightly above single disk perfomance. Has anyone been experiencing substantial real world speed increases with drives in a Raid through disk utility? I know it should be faster, but how much?
The trade-off of speed versus reliability kind of sketches me out. All the talk of losing everything if one drive goes out is pretty daunting.

I plan to use the standard 320 gig for apps and OS. Two drives set to a Raid-0. The last drive was either going to be a back-up or misc. file volume. I haven't tried Time Machine yet, but would it be sufficient to back up my files?

Thanks for any help. I want to make sure I set my machine up to run its best. Coming from my single 1.8 G5, no matter what, it's gonna seem like a bat outta hell to me.

Cheers.
 
Might want to read this:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JBOD

Raid performance greatly depends on the speed of the drives you choose and the interface. 10,000 RPM dual fiberchannel is going to go a lot faster than say 7200 RPM Firewire 800 for example. But it really depends what footage you're working with. If it's DV, DVCPROHD or HDV you're not going to need a whole lot of extra throughput. It's more for uncompressed HD where it's a necessity.

-Noah
 
Thanks for the info/link, Noah.

After reading more on the Raid option, I pretty convinced the risk outweighs the reward. It seems there really isn't all that substantial of a gain with a software raid. I think I'll just stick with the single drive configuration for now.
 
Noah,

Do you know if anybody makes a external drive that's battery powered so I would be able to offload data from my HVX.

Thanks Rob.
 
Rob I use this http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10724, but it does need to be bus powered.

Be careful though, youll note under other products there seems to be a 320gb version thats cheaper, well it is, but its only 5400 v 7200. Has built in raid 0 also.

Uses 6 pin to 6 pin fw cable direct from your camera, or you can dump it to your editing system on fw800.
 
I was thinking about a similar set up for a new mac pro with 3 500GB internal drives set up to raid-0.

The other option was to get something like the CalDigit S2VR Duo sata raid instead.

I will be mostly dealing with ProRes 422 material captured through a BM DeckLink HD card.

Will the external sata raids be any faster or more efficient?

Thanks,
Scott
 
Noel Evans said:
Rob I use this http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10724, but it does need to be bus powered.

Be careful though, youll note under other products there seems to be a 320gb version thats cheaper, well it is, but its only 5400 v 7200. Has built in raid 0 also.

Uses 6 pin to 6 pin fw cable direct from your camera, or you can dump it to your editing system on fw800.
Click to expand...
Noel,

How long would it take to unload a 16GB P2 card on that drive ?

Rob.
 
feeding the card via dual adapter to a macbook pro or straight from cameras fw? The issue with either is its most likely not the drive that will bottleneck but the throughput limitation from the camera (slow) or the dual adapter which is pretty quick. The drive itself is plenty fast enough on FW800
 
Noah is right on with the G-raid route. I have been using the G-raid mini for well over a year bus powered 7200 rpm for offloading P2 card. The size per GB has increased as mine is the 100 gig version but has never let me down from Argentina, Tanzania to the Alaskan peninsula this set up has never let me down. My two cents worth....

Also check out the sonnet fusion F2 640 GB raid solution.

http://www.g-technology.com/Products/G-RAID-mini.cfm

Jim Kinsey
 
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