To raid or not to raid

squig

squig

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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.
 
How much time will there be between backups? Although I don't use RAID 0 because of fears that losing one drive could be an issue, I've only actually seen two drive failures in the last decade. So if you're doing backups periodically there's no problem, I'd say try it. However, before you do so run a benchmark on one of the drives by itself; then run the same benchmark after. See exactly how much of a performance increase you might expect with your configuration. Also be aware that spinning up drives is one of the biggest power hogs on a small system, so that might be something to consider if battery life doesn't have a lot of leeway right now (assuming you're running off a battery).
 
I backup daily if I'm working on something important.

I've seen some tests on this setup and there was only a small hit on battery time surprisingly.

Eventually I'd like to go for a solid state setup but I'll wait till the price drops and capacity increases.
 
I have a macpro and use 2 500gb on a 1tb raid 0. Been editing on it about 2 years now. Never had a problem once, and like you said, backup your important stuff often, there still is a risk that one of the drives could fail or corrupt. But I say, go for the raid. Atleast until soild state drives are cheap and have larger capacities.
 
doing this would put your scratch disk on the same drive as your OS... keep them as 2 seperate drives. the 500gb 7200rpm drive should be fast enough for a stream of ProRes.
 
A RAID is not always need for video editing. You need only ask a few simple questions. What file format is your footage? Does it eat up large amount of hard disk space and does it drop frames? DV25, DV5, HDV, AVCHD can be edited on a single drive. If you use an intermediate coded like Apple's Pro Res it may indeed take and HDV file from 3 megabytes persecond into a codec that is about 12 megabytes persecond. Most hardrives can play several layers of video that is 3 megabytes per second but most will not play any more than three or four layers at 12 megabytes per seond.

Only you know if you need a RAID system or not.
 
Thx for the advice. I've decided to run them as 2 discrete drives. The 7200rpm momentus drives should give me around a 50% speed boost over the stock drive. I'll get a solid state boot drive when the prices come down and capacity increases.
 
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