Raided Drives - Will They Help Me

[KYLESMOM]

I posted this in Apple Basics but the repondent suggested this might be a more appropriate forum.

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

 

[spinnerlys]

It depends what what kind of footage you work with and what kind of compression they use.

The production company i work with for example used three 1TB FW800 drives to store and edit Digi Beta and DV material in 20:1 resolution, once the six shows were done with, they were batched to online quality and consolidated for colour correction and then cut to tape.

The other show we work on uses a RAID 5 configuration for network storage of 1300 DV and Digi Beta tapes, the DV tapes are stored in their original resolution, Digi Beta is stored as 10:1. We also employ many external FW800 drives for that.

If you want to edit uncompressed SD and HD footage (besides DV) you will gain some speed up due to a RAID configuration.