I've got my little G5 Dual 2Ghz machine here, with a couple external 250gig G-Drives, and a couple other firewire drives when needed. I've got my main system drive (with Leopard), and a 2nd 500 gig drive that's been split up and has Tiger on it so I can use my MC 2.8. I tried using my Leopard partition over a month ago, but Avid wouldn't work so I installed Tiger (I'm sure by scouring the forum I'll figure out how to make Leopard work), because I was doing back to back jobs at home and needed a working system.

Well, since you can only stick 2 drives in the old G5s, I just picked up a Sonnet G5 Jive, and their Tempo Sata card, so I could put a few more drives in (I've got my old 250gig drive that used to be in the spot where the new 500 gig Tiger drive is). I also just got my Mojo in today, mostly so I can finally have my client monitor running.

So the question is about should I Raid or not? I've never set up any of my computers to do it. Never really thought about using it as backup for media, because if stuff get's lost I'll just batch the tapes back in. Will I notice any real performance difference if I Raid a couple drives together? And which configuration to choose? All the info out there just confuses me. I'm good at following directions, but it doesn't neccessarily mean I understand how something works.

I rarely do "for pay" jobs from my home system, it's mostly personal stuff. But I do like to have my machines running as smooth as they can within reasonable costs (no point in spending over a 1000 on the machine, since I'll probably upgrade to an Intel Mac by the end of the year). And who knows when I'll actually get to play with my home Avid since I'll be starting my next editing gig in two weeks.

I've also got FCP on the system, so I'm not sure if that's something to consider. Generally I'd like to keep the media from both programs on separate drives.

Is there a "Raid for Dummies" thread somewhere on the board? Avid updated the look of the forums, but they should have overhauled the Search feature.

Any pointers will be appreciated.

Thanks,
Erik

You'll want to make sure you have equal-size drives or equal-size partitions.

Setting up a software RAID is quite simple in Tiger or Leopard - use the Disk Utility under Applications > Utilities to stripe together drives.   Disk Utility Help is actually quite good about this.

You will notice an overall increase in speed from a two-disk RAID0 array but it won't be incredibly different.   I would download a disk speed test and try it with your specific set-up and see if it makes enough difference to warrant the possibility of losing 2x the amount of data if only 1 drive fails.   

AJA has a decent speed test for Mac, and will give you some idea of the throughput possibilities of your storage(s): AJA KONA System Test Version 2

As for a 'Raid for Dummies' - Wikipedia is a good place to start.

HTH.

Raid away my friend Raid away!!!!!!!! You will definitly see a performance incress when you set up a Raid. There are many kinds of raid set ups you can do. The best for performance is Raid 0 also known as a striped array. It works like so - Instead of writing all of your data to a single drive, Raid 0 allows a file to be broken up into smaller chunks, which are then written across all the drives in the array. The more drives you have on your Raid the faster the overall performance will be. ( Think of it as spreading out the workload ) To get the most out of your raid you need to play with the strip size. I am not to sure what the best Strip size to use when it comes to video editing.. maybe someone can answer that one. To help you understand what strip size means think of it like this.. and im going to borrow this example form something I read. If a file is a Pizza, then a strip is a slice. Slap a 50KB File onto a four-drive array with a 16KB strip size and three hard drives will have full 16KB stripes while the fourth will have just 2KB. The size affects Raid performance because using smaller stripe sizes often spreads the simultaneous writes and reads across multiple drives, which improves transfer performance for larger files. When raiding makesure you are using the same hard drives in the Raid. once again the more you have the faster speeds you will get. Also there is Software Raid and Hardware Raid. Meaning if you have a Raid controller card you can plug into that and that will run your hard drives a bit better because it has its own procesor and ram, all for the Hard drives. Software will just run using your comuter cpu to minitor the Raid. I am running a Raid 0 with two drives Software of my motherboard an I am very happy with the speeds im getting. Then there is also Raid 1 which is pretty much nothing more then a back up of everything your doing on one drive to the other. If you want speed and backup, then Raid 0+1 ( or sometimes called Raid 10 ) which is the performance of raid 0 and he back up with.. you guessed it, Raid 1.

I guess the other question would be, does it make sense to have some media on raided drives and others not on raided drives? As I mentioned, I've got several firewire drives with media, and my pre-existing externals have media as well.

Hi there,

I think what I'm hoping to do is set up a RAID array, and do my editing on those drives... then when a project is finished, I'll copy it, and the associated media, and maybe some of the raw media, onto one of the (many, well, six) fw drives I've been using for the last few years.

So RAIDed drives for projects underway, and then 'archive' to fw drive.

sound good?

Malcolm

That's what I do mhcbc... I have 13 1TB and 2TB FW drives stacked up on shelf with all my old projects, media, graphic files, etc on them