RAID 0 safe for non archived P2

J

jameswmulryan

Active member
Lets say you dump your P2 card directly onto your Final Cut Pro edit system and start editing.
What happens if your raid0 system goes down? Seems like Raid 3 would be essential in this situation. Sonnet's SATA PCI card is only Raid 0. Sounds like Atto Fibre, 320SCSI cards or XServe Raids might be the only safe solution?
 
Practical definition of RAID0: Zero chance of recovering data if you loose one drive.

That said, RAID0 is very nice for performance, but null for security. I would suggest you either mirror your drive (RAID1), or use a RAID3 or RAID5 setup. There are options out there, no need to get into expensive solutions like Atto, SCSI, and XServe.

Do a search on google for RAID1, 3 or 5 SATA cards. At the minimum, you need RAID1 with 2 hard drives. Otherwise you can look at self contained solutions like LaCie Biggest F800. A bit expensive, but it's pretty much plug and play, and less expensive then SCSI and XServe.
 
so far we used RAID-0 because it is so sweet with its speed.
RAID-5 seems to be the next best option speedwise, but remeber you lose 1/3 of your diskspace: if you contain 3 times 200GB in a RAID-5 you only get to use 400GB.
RAID - 5 would write the data over 3 disks, but if one goes down the other two are able to recover the data with a third/new disk.
in a P2 world you can still use Raid-0 for editing, but you need to archivate your raw data before!! but IMO the devil never sleeps, so you will have to archivate it to another medium whatever you do. if one of your RAID-5 drives dies, there are chances one of the other two also go soon.
so i think i will stay with RAID-0 and instead copy everything twice: once to that RAID-0 and once to a huge, slow, but reliable RAID-1 on another system (like 4 times 500GB giving me 1 Terabyte RAID-1). when a project is done i am not sure yet, but i might copy those datas to yet another drive for the shelf or use DLT-tapes.
 
Yes, for just a "little" more money, redundancy in physically cloning your data elsewhere is always better. But "little" for some is not always little for others.
 
Thank you for the info. Physically cloning data seems very slow when you are bringing brand new material into your system. Maybe batch backups during the non-editing time periods?
The whole archive issue seems like the achilles heel of P2 or Firestore.
 
Hmmm! This just in from the dark corners of my still asleep mind.

- Get 2 hard drives in removable disk storage trays, configure them as RAID1
- Copy the data once (to both hard drives simultaneously)
- Remove the first drives and store in safe location
- Use the second drive for editing (and ignore RAID failure messages)

Could work? Have to try!

Better yet, get a second cheapper computer for the copying task, and insert the second drive in your NLE computer. Hotswap trays would probably work better though (practically speaking).

Just a random thought.
My 2 cents with depreciation.
 
I use a PC to work with and have a another in a separately room for backup. Both have RAID0. To use memory is the best thing in a camera. No mechanics parts, No head to change
 
There's another very good reason to run a RAID1 or RAID5 configuration on your editing computer: if a drive fails you don't lose your project. Sure, having archived the original video files is a great idea. But if your single or RAID0 drive fails while editing, how will you restore the 6 hours of work put into carefully arranging your shots, applying music, bringing in titles, etc..? The answer is easy of course, you're going to spend another 6 hours working.

If your work AND your time are both critical, a simple RAID1 configuration with two fast SATA or IDE drives would be a good investment (regardless of format). Its really not much more expensive than a typical single drive system, certainly not within the context of $6000 cameras and $2000 P2 cards.

Philip Williams
 
I had RAID0+1 and got a problem with my motherboard and everything was gone. Therefor i now use two PC
 
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