Raided Drives - Will They Help Me

[KYLESMOM]

I work in a public access television center where the public can produce their own programs. I have 2 new Mac Pro Xeon 2.66G with 8G of Ram in each using FCS and Adobe CS4. Having 2 drives Raided 0 sounds like it will make the processing faster, but (and there is always a but, isn't there?), the public producers check out a 500GB Lacie hard drive with which to edit and sore their files and when they are through with their project they check it back in much like a library book and we format it and check it out again. Since they are editing to an external drive, would raiding 2 internal drives gain me anything? I do appreciate your help.
~j

 

[BlueRevolution]

Yes. RAID 0 is often used for scratch disks for ripping and rendering video. I don't know much about the specifics, but you might have more success asking in the Digital Video forum.

 

[Queso]

The only advantage to RAID 0 is speed, which makes it perfect for temporary work space. However, if you're going to use it for anything else you need to keep a strict backup schedule. Losing any drive in a RAID 0 array kills the entire volume. Using RAID 1 with larger capacity drives is preferable if you plan to keep the data, even though it halves your potential space you get much faster read speeds and the protection that your data is still available if one of the HDDs craps out.