Raid recommendations?

boosh

boosh

Well-known member
Hey guys, I lost some footage a couple of days ago and although I had it backed up on another drive the editing file I was using was not backed up so I ended up loosing a few days of editing time. Anyway, it's promoted me to invest in some kind of raid system.

Ideally i want a raid 5 but the problem I'm finding is that I cant find one that is compatible with Mac OSX 10.5. I do plan on upgrading to a new imac next year and transferring over to premiere but in the meantime I'm still using my old 8 core mac pro with the antiquated FCP6. A raid 1 is fine for what I need and will do the job, just more expensive and less efficiently than Raid 5. This is the raid 1 I have been looking at:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00RCZ6N...m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&pf_rd_r=0ZG6E22RRRZBXY2M3QE7

I just wanted peoples opinions on this, if I am wasting my money on a raid 1 when a raid 5 is a better investment and also if anyone has used a decent raid 5 with mac OSX 10.5 that they could recommend?

Thanks!

Paul
 
I'm hardly the computer guru here, but I have had RAID 1 and RAID 5 on all of my Macs since well before 10.5 (Leopard). There is a big difference in performance and capacity between 1 and 5, which I hope you realize. In fact, 1 is just a mirror so you have two drives holding the same data. You could just have an external and Time Machine backups. You'd only be at risk of losing what you did that day if your TM back-ups were daily. You could change the setting to do back-ups more often, say every two hours or something, then you'd only be at risk of losing 2 hrs' worth of work.

Not sure why you think you can't use RAID 5 on your machine? Is it because you are trying to use disk utility to configure the RAID? If so, just get a RAID drive set-up that has the RAID built-in. Like this you don't need to mess with configuring it.

In short, you can buy a RAID 5 right now for your current Mac, and for little more than that 1 you're eyeing. Since your machine is older, it is likely pre-Thunderbolt, e.g., FW800 or eSATA?

Here's a link to a cheap RAID 5 solution that would do: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/M3QX2T08.0S/

Look around their site. They have far greater capacities and connectivity options on better units. If I were you I'd get the latest and greatest Thunderbolt 2 unit, then an adapter for your FW800 or eSATA. Like this when you upgrade your machine later, you'll have that killer throughput.

There's a website called macrumors.com with a big forum community. You can usually get a lot of speedy replies on Mac questions there. Not sure why a lot of others haven't ringed in...
 
I have the OWC olindacat linked to (16TB version in RAID 5) and I have no complaints other than it's louder now than when i first bought it.

Something to keep in mind is that backups and redundancy aren't the same thing. RAID 1, RAID 5, etc., can provide redundancy but they do not provide a backup. For example, if the power spikes and fries your RAID everything is toast. This is where a having a backup of everything on a separate drive(s), disconnected, and ideally in a different geographical location saves your bacon.


-Andrew
 
I'm sure you've made a purchase decision already but whichever way you went I'd urge you to consider an external drive to backup your RAID to (regardless of RAID 1 or 5) and a UPS to protect against surges. My experience has been surges are the biggest killers of arrays. For the money I'd go with Olindacat's recommendation and get something like the OWC unit below. It won't be as fast as a Thunderbolt RAID, but USB3 is no slouch, and firewire should be compatible with your Mac Pro until the upgrade later.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/M3QX2T08.0S/
 
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