Ok thanks for the replies so far everyone.
I am going to be using the system mainly for FCP. Some friends and I have started a company and we are going to be starting off doing wedding videos and some corporate stuff etc. We are also going to be doing some short films.
We are using HVX200 cameras, so we don't have physical master tapes. What I want is to be able to store any master files that I may need/want. Plus I want to have an edit drive to store all my FCP stuff.
The material can take up room quite quickly, though after the edit is done I can delete the FCP media. And if its a wedding could properly delete all of it after the client is happy. We use DVCPRO HD at 720p.
The only hard drive in my system at the moment is a 320Gb drive that came with the mac. I'd rather leave that alone, and start off by using the remaining three slots in the system.
I would strongly urge you not to use stripe sets for your primary working data, and opt for a redundant level of RAID. Unfortunately, the Mac Pro is only capable of 0/1/10 and JBOD.
- A mirror (RAID 1) is only the capacity of the smallest disk in the array, which is likely too small.
- A level 10 offers ~2x the speed of a single disk (4x disk set) with a redundancy of n = 2 (2x disks can fail before the data is gone). But it has the penalty of half the total capacity available to you (i.e. 8TB total, but only 4TB is usable).
For cache, you would likely benefit from a separate drive.
So you'd be better off using a parity based array (i.e. 5 or 6) for your primary array. But this also means you'll need a proper RAID card (meaning hardware based, not software, as software implementations cannot deal with the write hole issue associated with parity arrays). Such cards also mean using enterprise grade disks which are a bit more expensive (but worth it, as they're stable on RAID cards, and have improved specifications in order to take the abuse RAID causes to drives).
Beyond redundancy, either a 10 or 5 will offer you additional speed and capacity, which will be more conducive to good workflow, which can translate into shorter editing time and more jobs taken on in a given period of time (helps the bottom line).
I'm not sure of your workload or budgetary requirements, but this is something I'd strongly suggest you consider.
Past that, file sizes and capacity requirements would be a good place to start. As well as budget, and capacity consumption (need to make sure the storage system can keep up with your needs for 3 years without the need to replace everything; just add drives until you fill all the ports on the card).
As per backup/archival storage, eSATA based Port Multiplier enclosures are an inexpensive means to get mass storage on the cheap (
example).
