Hard drive configuration for MBP

[Eric Aumen]

I recently added some drives to my workflow to take all the media projects off my internal 500gb 5400rpm MBP drive. Now I have them on a 2tb raid 0 Mercury Elite Pro enclosure. The 2tb raid 0 is backed up to a 2tb mercury elite drive via carbon copy clone software. The internal 500gb drive is backed up to a 1tb mercury elite drive via time machine. I have the 1tb and 2tb mercury elite drives daisy chained to the raid 0 via fw800 and the raid 0 will be connected with esata as soon as i get my express card. I mainly edit weddings and mini documentaries. How does this set up sound? Am I losing any speed daisy chaining to the raid 0?

[Duncan Craig]

You're best bet is to download the Blackmagic Disc Speed App - free from the App Store. Then test your drives in daisy-chain and then direct. You'll see if there's a difference. It's likely there might be, but if your editing with compressed camera data and codecs it's unlikely you'll have a bottleneck at playback.

Also, set your edit software to warn you when you get dropped frames and run a few editing tests.

I have a Mercury Elite-AL Pro and I put 2 x 1TB drives in it, it's got eSata too, do you have that eSata?

Personally I don't use backup software, I keep lots of pairs of USB2 desktop drives and copy the capture scratch (or Events in FCPX) onto them every so often. All my rushes are on their own sets of USB2 drives too. If I was working with tight deadlines, client attended edits and big budgets then I'd have a mirrored RAID system for zero downtime, but for the work I do these days it's a waste of money for me.

Duncan.