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Fibre Channel Card vs. Time Capsule

LeKiD

LeKiD

macrumors regular
Original poster
Aug 31, 2007
213
0
Hi guys, I'm going to get a Mac Pro anytime soon. I own a PMG5 single 1.8 and really... I can't wait to go 8 cores. Anyway, My question is about raid and backing up info since I will be using my Mac for heavy duty editing.

The only thing is that I never got Raid on my computer and never got any trouble as loosing data... but I know, it could happen anytime. So, even though I don't know much about RAID and Fibre Channel Card, the new Time Capsule has been released. Would that be a sure way of backing up data instead of buying a Fibre Channel Card and get a RAID? What's the best system for backing up video editing work? I'd like to get this clarified by you... people who know!

Thanks guys!
 
Time Machine is automated backup software. RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) does not provide any backup capability at all - it just provides performance enhancements and/or survivability from a disk failure (what you get depends on RAID configuration). Fibre Channel is just a technology for connecting disk arrays to your computer (a high-throughput and typically expensive technology, I'll note). The three things are mutually independent of each other.

If you have a lot of video data that you want to archive, you may want to consider using backup tapes. If you don't need to retain old videos, but merely keep your "working" files, then using backup hard drive(s) along with Time Machine might be all you need. If you need archiving, I wouldn't recommend Time Machine.
 
cokersa said:
RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) does not provide any backup capability at all - it just provides performance enhancements and/or survivability from a disk failure
Click to expand...

What kind of performance enhancements would it be?
 
LeKiD said:
What kind of performance enhancements would it be?
Click to expand...

Performance enhancements depend on both the disk configuration you have and the type of computing you do. Match the wrong RAID configuration to the wrong type of computing, and you can make disk performance much worse than without RAID at all. If you are doing editing of large video files, then you would typically get the best performance with disk striping (RAID 0), but note that if you lose a single disk, you lose all your data (on all the disks). Disk mirroring (RAID 1) will save you from a disk failure, but performance won't be as fast (in certain cases, its worse than a single disk).
 
A Fibre card is for connecting to an XRaid which will cost more than your Mac Pro, obviously you won't be doing this.

You can get a RAID controller for the Mac Pro. RAID comes in several specs, the ones you'll be interested in for backup purposes are RAID1 - where the data from one drive is mirrored to another drive, so in the event of one failing all your data is still on the other. Then there's RAID5 (for which you need minimum 3 drives), here you get the usable space of 2 of the drives added together. All 3 drives appear as 1 in OS X and data is written across all 3 disks. Any 1 of the 3 disks in the RAID 'array' can fail and you will not lose your data.

All of this is over kill for you I think (unless you're oozing cash, in which case the RAID mentioned above would be awesome). Just grab a big internal or external drive to backup to. Then use Time Machine or SuperDuper/Carbon Copy Cloner. Or of course Time Capsule will do, but backing up video editing I'd do locally rather than over the network for speed.
 
Hey edesignuk! You made it very clear to me know. Thanks for vulgarizing it for me! Very help full! I'm thinking about getting time capsule and I also have 3 external hard drive to keep my data. I guess that what I really fear is more having a Final Cut Pro edit getting lost from a disk failure and having to recapture everything and start again from scratch.

So I guess that by combining certain raid configurations, I would be able to gain data accessibility and copying/mirroring my drive(s) on one of them.
 
LeKiD said:
Thanks cokersa!
Click to expand...

My pleasure. Do you know how much data you want to store/backup? Unless you have a LOT of data, you can probably just use internal disks bays instead of buying external drives. I'm using four drives in my Mac Pro: one Leopard system disk, one disk for Time Keeper backups, one Vista Ultimate x64 system disk, and one disk for Vista backups. That way I have an always current backup in the system (of course, if my system goes up in flames I'm screwed as I don't have an off-site backup, but I think the odds of that are pretty low). Obviously I'm not using RAID in this configuration, since I don't need the performance enhancements of it.

Properly configured, your backup disk should have all of your software on it, so you should be able to quickly restore Final Cut or whatever software you have. Of course, that doesn't help much with a file that was edited between backups - RAID 1 would cover that situation if a disk failed. However, RAID won't cover it if you accidentally delete something or have it corrupted (which has happened to me before) - in that case you need a backup copy.
 
I already have my share of external disk. I have 650gigs total space with my 3 external drives. I mostly want to archive my edited work (HDV edits) and I really don't want to have my video capture crushed by a disk failure. From what I read, it seems that it does happen sometimes but I guess I've been lucky so far, none of them died on me.
 
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