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Back Up Storage and HD Speeds

C

calviin

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 16, 2008
218
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I recently got into video editing and got a new MBP 17". Would a bus powered 1 tb 5400 rpm hard drive be fast enough for FCP 7? Nothing complicated. One or two filters at most for basic color correction. Any suggestions on a bus powered drive?

Of course, once I'm done with movies, I need a more permeant home for them. I'm thinking of something like this but with more bays where I can put drives so that it can be more future proof. (And yes, 8 teras won't last me all that long when each project is typically 500-750 gigs large.) I know the Drobo Pro has eight bays but the reviews for speed and recovery weren't that good. Or is there a way I can build my own that is Mac compatible?
 
Get an ExpressCard eSATA card. Otherwise you are limited to USB 2.0 or FireWire, which are both painfully slow compared to today's standards. eSATA card should be less than 50 bucks. 4-bay eSATA enclosures go for around $100 so the savings are pretty massive too.
 
I actually already have a esata card. Can you link me to where I can get an enclosure for $100? Is RAID built in or can I use Disk Utility to set it up that way?
 
calviin said:
I actually already have a esata card. Can you link me to where I can get an enclosure for $100? Is RAID built in or can I use Disk Utility to set it up that way?
Click to expand...

If your eSATA card is a SATA port multiplier, then you could use software RAID as a PM will allow your Mac to see each drive independently. If it isn't a PM, then the box needs built in RAID in order to present all the disks as a single volume.

I have to say I bought one of these cheaper SATA RAID enclosures before and got burned - it worked fine for a few weeks then the RAID array went degraded and there was nothing I could do to recover it. Luckily I had a backup, but I won't trust my data to (really) cheap kit anymore. That's not to say they don't work, just that I had a bad experience.

Would a network storage solution not be a viable option for you?
Synology, NetGear, QNAP, Cisco and others all produce 4, 6 or 8 drive NAS boxes that typically support RAID 5 or RAID 6, so you could bung say 8 x 3TB drives in a RAID 6 array and you'll get 18TB accessible. performance is pretty good too, most are capable of delivering a sustained 100MB R/W.It's not a cheap option, but will give you lots of capacity and is very flexible, reliable and easy to set-up.

There's a site called smallnetbuilder.com that does some really useful reviews and benchmarks.

My own NAS storage box is a bit of a home build, but it was very easy and very cheap to build. I used an HP MicroServer with 4 x 2TB drives in a RAID-Z array running under FreeNAS - cheap (UK £390, approx $500), fast and took less than 2 hours to set up. You could do the same but use 3TB drives rather than 2TB to give a total of 9TB, that would add around £200 to the cost.
 
calviin said:
I actually already have a esata card. Can you link me to where I can get an enclosure for $100? Is RAID built in or can I use Disk Utility to set it up that way?
Click to expand...

Just to help, Newegg always has a ton of products at great prices.

The reviews and ratings system there is pretty accurate as well; just trying to help :)
 
Regarding the Drobo Pro, it has an iSCSI connection to your MBP that will fully saturate a gigabit ethernet connection. I doubt you'll have any speed issues with 90 megs * 18 tb to your laptop.
 
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