RAID vs Thunderbolt SSD external

[offbeatbryce]

Right now I have a 2TB SSD external powered by Thunderbolt. It's crazy fast for premiere editing. Someone else suggested to me that I need a RAID system. I've read about various systems like this and not sure if I really need one. I've also read that Drobo is a very unreliable product and so are most RIAD systems especially RAID 0 as both drives can fail at once. Do I need a RAID or am I fine? I'm using an iMac i7 with 16GB of ram. It has a built in fusion drive. I have all my data backed up on time machine as well as backblaze offsite.

 

[David W. Jones]

I use a raid 0 4 drive Thunderbolt setup, which I will replace in the future with 4 SSD drives in an attempt to gain even more speed. I do a daily backup of the raid with carbon copy cloner. The majority of my projects are multi-layer commercials, so I need a pretty fast setup. If you are happy with your current setup I wouldn't worry. But you might run a speed test to verify your setup's speed as a baseline. Here is what my setup runs at. As you can see it is still a little slow, hence wanting to replace the hard drives with SSD's.

 

[Bassman2003]

Yes, the type of editing really determines how much speed you need. 4+ layers of 4k with decent bitrates or 2 layers of AVCHD. The lower the bitrate the less stress on the hard drives.