Making a system on Macbook with FCE

[Yoshiyasu]

I use Macbook and Final Cut Express 4.

I handle DV and I am going to make RAID system for it.
However, I have no idea which RAID I should make. I think I need RAID 0, striping , but I have to consider RAID 1.

I might purchase an external 1 TB Firewire 400 Hard Disk Drive. Is it possible to make RAID 0 and RAID 1 in 1 external drive and how I can make it?

 

[CaptainChunk]

First of all, you really don't need RAID-0 to edit DV. It's only 25Mbps (which is just over 3MB/s). Even with multiple streams, you'd be hard-pressed to saturate the bandwidth of a modern single-disk hard drive with DV content. RAID-0 is really a misnomer, because it's only striping two or more disks together for speed and offers no redundancy.

RAID-1 is mirroring two disks and will duplicate everything you do on one disk (read OR write) to the other. So, it offers redundancy, but also understand that no form of RAID will make your data 100% fail-safe. As a video editor, it is essential to make backups of your media and work to other disks outside of your RAID to prepare for the unexpected. For example, if you accidentally delete a fail in a RAID-1 array, that same file will also be deleted from the mirrored disk.

I don't recommend using RAID-1 for a scratch disk. The overhead will actually slow things down a bit, especially if you use software RAID, which would normally be the case in a laptop unless the external HDD enclosure has its own hardware RAID controller.

 

[Yoshiyasu]

Thank you very much.

I actually use Neat Video and Red Giant Looks. They are very heavy when I render the footage on FCE.

It is shame I use USB2.0 external HDD for FCE and I suppose it would be faster using Firewire than USB2.0.

I just have a question.
How I can nicely construct the system for to do that with Macbook and 1 TB Firewire 400 external HDD? This 1 TB Firewire 400 external HDD can be separated by partition.

 

[CaptainChunk]

Rendering with filters and plug-ins will mostly be a function of the CPU and sometimes, GPU. Essentially what's happening when you render is that it's writing new copies of the DV video to your /Render Files folder with the effects embedded. So even so, once you're rendered, DV isn't a huge strain on modern hard drives. When you start moving up to the higher-bitrate codecs (DVCPRO, REDCODE, uncompressed, etc.), faster drive systems start to make a lot more sense.

Prebuilt external FW drives are all reasonably fast for DV: WD, Seagate, LaCie, G-Tech...take your pick. If you're more of DIYer, OWC makes very good FW-based drive enclosures, both single and multi disk (a lot of the multi disk models have RAID controllers) that you can throw your own bare drives into.

 

[Yoshiyasu]

Thank you

Thank you for giving me the advice.

I would buy 2TB(2×1TB in 1 box) external firewire HDD soon.
It would be show as 2 drives on my macbook because it is 1TB×2, I suppose.
I will use one of them for editing and the other for backup.

However, I have no image how I construct that system by Disk Utility on macbook efficiently? Disk A (1TB) for editing, Disk B is a backup disk for Disk A.

I imagine it is the safe and best way. Do you think so?