2 x 320G or 1x 500G HD?

[Monyx]

It's cheaper per GB for me to buy a couple of 320GB HD and RAID0 OR get SEAGATE ST3500630AS 500GB 7200.10 for a good price at least by Australian standards (USD217 delivered, 5yr warranty). Application: editing SD DVcam footage so speed not critical - which is recommended?

I note the anomalies at barefeats re Seagate so bit wary of the 7200.10. I don't think reaching full 2tb or 3tb is an issue for me, althouth I will be using MacPro as PVR with a digial tuner.

Mark.

 

[After G]

There was some equation pertaining to reliability in RAID 0 arrays such that:

reliability = average reliability of the disks / number of disks.

Your RAID 0 array would be roughly half as reliable as one 500 GB disk. If you used them separately though since speed isn't important, more space is better IMO.

 

[THX1139]

I'm sort of in the same situation. What I think I'm going to do is get the two 320's and run them in RAID0 for scratch and capture. Then save up and get a 500 for storage and secondary boot drive. That leaves me with the stock 160 for the OS and applications. I will eventually replace the 160 with a 10K raptor for faster startup and access. I'm not too worried about losing data on the Raid since I'll only use it for capture, scratch and quick edits. All complete edits will go out to external firewire and DVD plus the 500 data storage drive until it gets archived. Once I'm done with a project, I'll probably wipe the RAID drives. Even though I'm not overly concerned about massive data loss... I hate the idea of losing capture files and having to start over wasting time. So, I'll at least go with the WD drives that are optimized for RAID. They have longer MTBF life and they are reasonable $$ for 320's. They also have a 5 year warranty like Seagate.

Let me know what you decide. I'm always interested in hearing about solutions people come up with.

 

[ReanimationLP]

WD drives are god.

I love my Dual 250GB drives. So quiet, cool-running, and cheap, but still very fast performers on my Serial ATA bus.

 

[alien2108]

Also consider fact one drive is less noise than two....If that is important to you ofcourse!

 

[gkhaldi]

I'd go for the 2 but in Raid 1. Added security availibility with a little performance hit due to twice the write commits.

However, increased speed when reading from disks (especially smaller files are better spread since prefetching does work in a RAID 1 environment)

 

[livingfortoday]

You could get 3 of the 320GB disks, and run them in RAID 5, and that way have the 640GB space, and some security at the same time. I plan on doing that in my G4 whenever it gets up and running. OS X doesn't have a software option for that, though, so you'll most likely need a RAID card that supports it.

 

[trainguy77]

I would go with two 320 gb drives and run the independent of each other. This way if one goes you have not lost everything and you don't have the CPU hit of running RAID. Unless you have a really good reason that it needs to look like one drive.

 

[spicyapple]

Editing DVCAM footage probably means you'll be better off with a RAID0 setup with 2 x 320GB HDs (my configuration, so I'm a little biased). Using OSX to manage the RAID, I was able to get a performance increase of 60%-80% better write and read performance, which is fast when copying and moving around huge gigabyte+ files.

Reliability is cut in half, but all of these files don't require back-up as they get deleted as each project is completed. In cases of editing video, speed is more important than reliability.

 

[sirnh]

Editing DVCAM footage probably means you'll be better off with a RAID0 setup with 2 x 320GB HDs (my configuration, so I'm a little biased). Using OSX to manage the RAID, I was able to get a performance increase of 60%-80% better write and read performance, which is fast when copying and moving around huge gigabyte+ files.

Reliability is cut in half, but all of these files don't require back-up as they get deleted as each project is completed. In cases of editing video, speed is more important than reliability.

If you are talking about normal DVCAM, you are talking about a little over 3MB/s. You can play several streams of that without a problem. When you get to DV100/DVCPro HD or Uncompressed, then you really need raid.

I agree with others, stick with a single drive over raid 0 or JBOD unless you really need the bandwidth.

 

[Monyx]

Thanks for the pointers - I suspected I should treat the set-up much like my current G4 which has separate HDs for source & destination for encodes, PVR processing, AIFF --> AC3 etc.

Also ensures optimising CS2 and FCP with scratch drives separate to media drives. Managing it this way on the lowly G4500 actually makes it quite usuable. Once I read that RAID0 requires CPU to manage it...nope not too interested if I don't need it.

 

[MacBass]

I would say 2 WD 320 GB HDDs in RAID 1. But that's for data security reasons.