To raid or not to raid

squig

squig

Veteran
I have a 2.5Ghz macbook pro (early 08 penryn) and I just discovered that I can get a drive caddy from MCE that fits in the superdrive space and I can get 2 500Gb seagate momentums and setup a terabyte raid. I'm running final cut studio 2 with 4 Gb ram and I'm transcoding to prores HQ. I'm going to be spending 4 hours a day on a train commuting to and from film school for 12 months so I don't want to run an external drive. I will have an external drive at home for backups and an external raid when I start cutting my feature. Losing the superdrive isn't an issue as I have 2 powerbooks. My understanding is that a raid 0 setup won't be as reliable as a standalone drive so my question is will it be worth it or should I just run the 2 drives individually? Essentially I'm trying to decide between performance and reliability.
 
While 500 gigs isn't a ton, I would definitely choose the RAID solution. I am soon going to move to a raid setup myself because I have realized that I have stuff that is priceless to me on here. *shudder* it makes me... well, shudder to think about loosing it. Even if you keep most of your stuff at home, if you are worried about 500 gigs not being enough, that means that you are risking losing over 500 gigs of stuff if you go the non raid route... make sense? I'm tired. Anyways, you could always set-up the raid, and if you feel yourself hitting that 500 gig wall over and over again and needing to delete stuff, then you can decide from there to change to the full 1 terabyte. Who knows... maybe you won't even fill up the 500 gigs? Or maybe you will haha. If you have big 5d ii HD files on there.
 
RAIDs are unnecessary for editing Prores footage. Also, I would strongly suggest never having your footage on your boot drive.

Keep the second drive separate and call it something like "media" and have some fun. Thats a great set up.

RAIDing your boot drive is another no no because it decreases reliability.

One last note: Back up your footage
One last question: Would you rather lose one of your copies of your footage and have to recopy it and get a new drive? or would you rather crash your computer and have to reinstall the OS and all of the programs as well as lose all of your footage?

When it comes to harddrives. Be pessimistic.
 
Ryan your advice,
"Keep the second drive separate and call it something like "media" and have some fun. Thats a great set up.

RAIDing your boot drive is another no no because it decreases reliability.

One last note: Back up your footage
One last question: Would you rather lose one of your copies of your footage and have to recopy it and get a new drive? or would you rather crash your computer and have to reinstall the OS and all of the programs as well as lose all of your footage?

When it comes to harddrives. Be pessimistic."
is 100% correct.

If, you decide to edit video on your boot drive (not really recommended...) should, must, definitely, save the new rendered file to a completely separate physical harddrive.

I have killed a boot (system) drive a few years ago, whist editing a audio CD (actually 'normallising' the entire disc) and I had a monentary lapse of reason, and saved the new files to the same physical drive. You cannot imagine the pain this caused me.

Why is saving a big file to the same physical drive so bad ? The same heads are doing the reading of the source files and writing of the new file. The heads vibrate ferociously, reading drom one place, then writing to another place for an extended period of time (you can hear this) then, silence....

Buy saving the new file to a separate (defragmented) physical drive, the drive heads hardly move at all.

I do not believe Raid is necessary for most users for speed either for the editing drives - as your CPU will generally be the speed bottleneck during rendering. SATA is pretty good now.
 
Thx for the advice guys. I've been overworking hard drives doing multitrack audio editing for over 15 years and I've never lost any data. I've always done a nightly backup of the days work. I haven't experienced a disk failure but never had a raid setup.

For the moment I'll run them as 2 discrete drives. I should get around a 50% speed boost with the 7200rpm momentus over the stock drive and a separate defragged scratch/data drive will increase performance too.

When the prices come down a bit and capacity increases I might replace the boot disk with a solid state drive.
 
Hey sorry guys, I know this is old, but is there any problem with having an external raid drive from which you edit etc? Any downside? Also, what does Ryansheffer mean by "Raid's are unnecessary for editing Prores?"
 
Hey Squig,

OT but are you teaching or learning at film school and which one? Also I live in Sydney and was wondering if you'd hire out some of your lenses?

Cheers
 
samphibbs said:
Hey Squig,

OT but are you teaching or learning at film school and which one?
Cheers
Click to expand...

hehe I've been asking myself the same question, I'm supposed to be a student.

I'm not hiring out any lenses, they are so hard to come by it's just too much hassle. There are places that do though just google "nikon lenses hire sydney".

I will probably start hiring out my full rig in a few months once I finish getting it all together but I'll be going along with it.
 
Entity said:
Hey sorry guys, I know this is old, but is there any problem with having an external raid drive from which you edit etc? Any downside? Also, what does Ryansheffer mean by "Raid's are unnecessary for editing Prores?"
Click to expand...

The only downside is that you are twice as likely to have a disk failure, but it's still unlikely. The prores data-rate is manageable with a decent 7200rpm drive. So far I've just been using the internal 5400rpm drive without any probs but I'm replacing it with a 500gb 7200rpm system drive and running a second drive as my FCP scratch disk rather than a raid setup.
 
Every one of our workstations dealing with media uses a RAID 0 array of between 2 to 3 drives and automated daily backup :-) The reason we do this is pretty simple. Restoring a backup from the networked NAS units we use takes about 1 minute/4GB of data and runs from a boot CD...so restoring a failed array is pretty painless. That said, we haven't lost one yet...but we will. The NAS units we've got tweaked to deliver 90 to 100MB/s second over cheap gigabit LAN, but they will only sustain that data rate to a workstation that can accept that rate..which in real world practive takes a 2 to 3 drive RAID 0.

Unless you're rendering, your disk speed is the single slowest component in your workstation for most operations. Speeding that up by a factor of 2 to 3 times makes a pretty big difference everywhere. Even our "silent" HTPC's use two drive RAID zero arrays to make sure they don't bog on large file/bitrate playback.

Btw, RAID5 would increase your fault tolerance, not reduce it. The problem we've found though is that write rates to these arrays are generally poor, while read rates can be comparable to RAID 0. Regardless, I've given up on RAID for workstation fault tolerance (but all of our servers use RAID5!) per se as there's absolutely no substitute for daily (or more frequent) backup and a tested/proven disaster recovery plan. On the workstation therefore, RAID 0 using your onboard motherboard controller is the cheapest performance kick you'll likely find these days.
 
what about software raid 0 (striped) in osx?

will it provide noticeable improvements to performance?

i dont have the money to shell out for a real hardware raid card at the moment.
 
phasion said:
what about software raid 0 (striped) in osx?

will it provide noticeable improvements to performance?

i dont have the money to shell out for a real hardware raid card at the moment.
Click to expand...

Software raid solutions will never provide the improvement that's possible with a good hardware-based raid card. With a software based solution like you're describing, you're putting more load on your CPU.
 
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