External RAID vs. External Harddrive

[Mr. Anderson]

So why would I spend more on a RAID system - I'm thinking of getting a terrabyte external drive of some sort and with doing a ton of animation and video I want to get something that's going to give me the least headaches.

D

 

[LethalWolfe]

So why would I spend more on a RAID system - I'm thinking of getting a terrabyte external drive of some sort and with doing a ton of animation and video I want to get something that's going to give me the least headaches.

D

What kind of video are you going to be working with? If you are working with DV or HDV you could RAID for backup, but you wouldn't need to RAID for speed.


Lethal

 

[Counterfit]

Keep in mind that if one drive in a mirrored RAID setup dies, all your data is GONE.

 

[LethalWolfe]

Keep in mind that if one drive in a mirrored RAID setup dies, all your data is GONE.

I think you meant if one drive fails in a stripped set (RAID 0) then you lose all yer data, 'cause half the data is on HDD A and the other half is on HDD B. A mirrored setup (RAID 1) is redundant (the same data is written to both HDDs).


Lethal

 

[Mr. Anderson]

What kind of video are you going to be working with? If you are working with DV or HDV you could RAID for backup, but you wouldn't need to RAID for speed.

Cool - then I'll go with a little less expensive system and get just a fw800 enclosure. I'll be doing DV and eventually HDV - but I think I'll use the internal drives for the project and archive to the external.

I'm also hoping the blue ray systems become available this year - that way I can backup every thing and keep them separate.

 

[skimaxpower]

If you're thinking of this drive for long term backup, its definitely worth it to use FCP's "Media Manager" utility. It lets you backup a finished project in full quality, but deletes all the extra video / spare takes that you didn't use.

There's lots of nifty options (like leaving 5 second handles in case you wanna extend scenes or add transitions later.) Read up on it in the manual. Lots of info.

NOTE: Media manager requires two hard drives. A source drive and a destination drive. But, I'm pretty sure these can also be two different partitions of the same drive.

 

[Mr. Anderson]

If you're thinking of this drive for long term backup, its definitely worth it to use FCP's "Media Manager" utility. It lets you backup a finished project in full quality, but deletes all the extra video / spare takes that you didn't use.

There's lots of nifty options (like leaving 5 second handles in case you wanna extend scenes or add transitions later.) Read up on it in the manual. Lots of info.

NOTE: Media manager requires two hard drives. A source drive and a destination drive. But, I'm pretty sure these can also be two different partitions of the same drive.

Very cool - I think I might take advantage of this - still have to get the extra drives, though.

Thanks,

D

 

[jelloshotsrule]

If you're thinking of this drive for long term backup, its definitely worth it to use FCP's "Media Manager" utility. It lets you backup a finished project in full quality, but deletes all the extra video / spare takes that you didn't use.

thanks for that tip. never really knew about it and haven't used fcp's media manager at all, just avid's method of redigitizing the final cut at high quality, so this is something i'll have to look into!

 

[superwoman]

So why would I spend more on a RAID system - I'm thinking of getting a terrabyte external drive of some sort and with doing a ton of animation and video I want to get something that's going to give me the least headaches.

D

You should consider either RAID 1 or even RAID 5, if protection against data loss is important. Do you have backup plan for your data? If you're really working with "terrebytes" of data, then I don't think tape backup is something you want to mess with, because it's messy. RAID 1 would in fact be your best bet for data backup. It is _very_ unlikely for both HDD to fail at the same time at the same spot.

I agree that RAID 0 is not worth the trouble, because of the increased probability of data loss.

 

[ChrisA]

Why RAID

So why would I spend more on a RAID system - I'm thinking of getting a terrabyte external drive of some sort and with doing a ton of animation and video I want to get something that's going to give me the least headaches.

D

A true RAID system uses multiple disk drives that act together as if they were one very large and fast disk. The simplest RAID is just two drives but more typicaly it's a set if five or more drives. I've seen RAID systems for dozens of drives or more.

What you get for thr money

(1) Much larger storage space, multi-terabytes systems are possable
(2) Much faster multiple drives can work in parallel the total bandwidth can be huge
(3) Fault tolerance. one drive can fail and an end user would never now the
RAID system can continue servig data while it recreates the lost drive using
a hot spare. Later someone can swap out the failed drive

Any Apple Mac can do RAID in software but you gain only about 50% of the above
to gain all of the above you need an external hardwar RAID system. The cost is
justified only if it can be shaerd between several workstations

I do work in an environment where we have a large RAID system. It is nice to be able to sit down at any workstation and have my same data available. It's alsonice to be ble to wait a day or two to swap out broken drives. Apple's RAID systemis actually one of the lowest priced one in the industry

 

[ChrisA]

RAID 1 would in fact be your best bet for data backup. It is _very_ unlikely for both HDD to fail at the same time at the same spot..

RAID 1 (mirror) protects you from only one cause of data loss, a faild drive. This cause however is NOT the most common cause of data loss. The most comon cause is "operator error" simply dragging the wrong file to the trash or pressing "Save" after making an editing error and over writting your last good copy of a documatn or photo. Next in line are "system screwups" like file system corruption or maybe iPhoto deveops a bug wher it write trash all over a libray or the pwer shuts down while the system was writting to disk. These hapen with greater frequency than a disk failure.

You really need off-line backups and enough media so you do not have to over write you last back at least not for a while, you need to rotate the media or use non-erasable media.

The thing about computers or anything else you use every day is that a one in a thousand chance freak event will happen about every three years Like maybe you mke one of those "operator errors" not notice you did it and then do a backup and overwrite your good copy that was on the backup drive. So think up a plan that is fool proof even in the one in a hundred thousand case. RAID can beone part of a larger plan but not the total plan

 

[mrichmon]

So why would I spend more on a RAID system - I'm thinking of getting a terrabyte external drive of some sort and with doing a ton of animation and video I want to get something that's going to give me the least headaches.

A terrabyte of storage? What are your backup plans?

If you don't have any backup plans then there are two possibilities:

• you don't care about loosing the data,
• you do care about not loosing the data.

If the answer is that you don't mind loosing the data then a terrabyte external drive is your friend.

If the answer is that you don't want to loose the data then you need a RAID. RAID 5 would be nice or RAID-X. RAID-X has the benefit that it will expand the RAID capacity as you add drives. When you get to the point of having filled the enclosure you can swap out the drives and replace them one at a time with larger drives. Ultimately this means that you can increase the capacity of your RAID-array without needing to find somewhere to store the data from your RAID while you reformat it.