Hard drives out of control - RAID help

[matteusclement]

My video hobbie has gotten pretty serious and I thought I had all my problems solved with a Mac pro. Seems not as now hard drives seem to be reproducing in my house. I.E- HDV footage w/ color correction is alot of GB.

SO I know about RAID 0/1/5 but not 10.

My questions are:

1. do I want to have a RAID 5 external for my scratch disc & capture drive? I would assume 5 drives.


2. Or have 2 external RAID 0. One as a capture and one as scratch disc.

This way I could have my 4 drives in my comp as OS, Win7, Storagex2

any other mixes and flavors?

 

[Eaton Photos]

I am in a similar situation.

First, to answer your questions:

From my perspective, I would rather have a drive in the box, that is Scratch, than using an external drive via USB/ FW/ eSata.

Personally, I would never use RAID 0, unless you absolutely need the speed, & don't have enough ram.

However, compared to your thoughts, I'm playing my cards a bit differently.

A) I just bought 12GB of Ram from OWC. Definitely need more ram for rendering/ capture.

B) I just bought 3X WD 1TB 64MB Blacks. Their purpose will fall into my following setup:

Bay 1: 250GB- OS (right now OSX, but will add a Win 7 partition at some point)
Bay 2: Currently a 250GB that I use for Scratch. Is being replaced with 1X 1TB for Scratch purposes with both Photoshop & FCE.
Bay 3 & Bay 4: 2X 1TB linked in Raid 1 Configuration, for Data Back-up.

Outside of my Mac Pro, I have a Networked Synology DS410, running 4X WD Green 2TB HDD's, in a RAID 10 (1+0) Configuration. In RAID 10, I have approximately 3.6TB's of total Storage. I could have config'd with RAID 5 or 6, but for my needs, redundancy is more important than total storage.

Hope this input helps.

 

[matteusclement]

A little over the top

Your redundancy is over the TOP! WOW!
I need speed, so hence the RAID 0 obsession

 

[jampat]

My video hobbie has gotten pretty serious and I thought I had all my problems solved with a Mac pro. Seems not as now hard drives seem to be reproducing in my house. I.E- HDV footage w/ color correction is alot of GB.

SO I know about RAID 0/1/5 but not 10.

My questions are:

1. do I want to have a RAID 5 external for my scratch disc & capture drive? I would assume 5 drives.


2. Or have 2 external RAID 0. One as a capture and one as scratch disc.

This way I could have my 4 drives in my comp as OS, Win7, Storagex2

any other mixes and flavors?

I wouldn't do raid 0 for capture, if either drive dies, everything is gone. Search for posts by Bigbossbomb (or something similar). He is a video guy that has given out helpful ideas on hard drives before.

Personally, I think Raid 5 is the way to go for you for capture/storage, but if your expenses related to your hobby are not already out of control, this will put them there. Raid 5 gives you speed and redundancy and doesn't cost you as much space as Raid 1. I don't need the speed for what I do and the controllers were really expensive so I just have a pile of internal drives and a docking station. Each drive is manually mirrored to a second drive. This is a storage hassle, but fully redundant (possibility of losing some work that occurred before mirroring though), the backups are split so they shouldn't be lost at the same time as the originals. Obviously slower than Raid 0 or 5, not as space efficient as Raid 5, but the extra drives I need are way less than the controller and box.

Good luck.

 

[KeithPratt]

Are you keeping all captured footage and renders? If you have the footage on tape you need only keep the project file and a master. If you need to go back to a project you can re-capture.

I wouldn't do raid 0 for capture, if either drive dies, everything is gone.

The same could be said for a single drive.

I need speed, so hence the RAID 0 obsession

A single 2TB drive should get you 4 concurrent streams of ProRes. I run 4 disks in RAID5 but as I work almost exclusively with ProRes I don't make use of the speed.

 

[matteusclement]

RAID 5 eh?

this RAID 5... sounds interesting. Might be a way to get my hard drives a little more lined up.

THE RAID 0 thing is because my hard drives are my bottle neck when I am rendering in FC. With some new WD blacks though, it's not as much the case anymore.