...I should have said, I'm thinking 2TB drives in mirrored raid.
Caviar Black Enterprise is sounding like a good option.
SSD-wise, I was thinking it was just for OSX and applications, so I was going to keep audio and picture libraries on the raid drive, then use the 1TB stock hard drive for Time Machine backups.
Is that a good idea?
What's the RAID 1 for? Backup?
I ask, as you don't really need to do that IMO. Single disk or
JBOD is sufficient. Both have the same failure conditions (if a disk dies, the data on it is gone; in a JBOD, the other disks still retain their data). You can use other RAID levels that offer better capacity usage as well as redundancy, but you'd really be looking at RAID 5 most likely (usable capacity =
n - 1 disks, as the capacity value of one disk is needed for parity data).
BTW:
- Caviar Black = consumer model
- RE4 = RAID Edition
Both are available in 2TB capacity models.
As per the SSD, it's faster at random access than any other disk technology, so it will be the fastest way to load your libraries (audio in particular). You'll notice the difference, according to those that have done it.
Are you sure you need RAID 1 if you have 1TB HD for backups? That sounds like a decent plan though
If it were for primary data, it may be worth it. But not so much for a backup solution (using a second, non RAID connected disk would give additional data security for that sort of thinking).
Nanofrog - is there still sufficient advantage to using the RE4s if I'm not using a dedicated raid card?
Yes.
They have better specifications (namely MTBF and non-recoverable bit errors; enterprise = 1.2 - 1.4hrs of MTBF v. 800,000 hrs for consumer models, and error rates are 1E15 and 1E14 for enterprise and consumer non recoverable bit errors respectively).
They also have additional sensors that help prevent crashes (when the heads physically smack the platter/s, as the scratch that results = lost data).
For scratch space, you may not care, as disks are cheap enough (and the data is temp anyway). Up to you if you want to deal with the down time (actual time you'd have to use fixing it). This is dependent on non-critical data (stripe set is disasterous for critical data, and anyone that uses it for that, is a fool).
If you really want your Mac Pro to be near silent don't go Black! Seriously!
I dumped my 3 Black drives after a few month because the noise was really unacceptable. Two of them were 1TB Black drives which I replaced with 2 WD20EARS (WD Green).
They are configured as a RAID 0 and run absolutely stable for more than half a year now. No problems whatsoever. The speed of the array is absolutely identical to the RAID 0 out of 2 1TB Blacks (200MB/s+).
My Pro is now equipped with 4 Green drives and an Intel SSD for boot. The machine is almost inaudible.
I've never had problems out of mine (1TB Blacks used for backup drives), RE3's for the SATA RAID.
I've not had access to the newer models yet (i.e. larger cache versions and capacities), but hopefully there's reviews that include noise testing (dB results).
There's also been reports that the Green models don't survive well in RAID (makes sense to me for random access, as they're slower armatures = servo motors). Combine this with the lack of the additional sensors, crashes are more likely IMO. They're really meant more for sustained transfers than random access (i.e. backup and large files). Performance can be dealt with by adding additional drives if they are used in a RAID environment. But there may not be sufficient SATA ports to accomodate this.
Up to the individual to figure this out.
