Need RAID for HDV?
 

I've captured a few short tests of HDV to a single drive - it seems to capture fine (it's a newish 250Gb SATA II 3Gbps WD). Is a RAID 0 array really necessary?

Thanks in advance!
Douglas

Hi Douglas..........
 

Short answer = No.

Long Answer = Yes.

Doing short tests doesn't really tell how your entire workflow progresses in large runs. Rendering a 60 minute HDV project will soon show you the difference a Raid setup will make to the processing times (always assuming your processor(s) is/ are up to snuff).


I suggest you shooot enough stuff to get to say, a 30 minute short, do the full render and time it.

If your processor(s) are up to the job, the Raid will beat the single drive hands down in any configuration (all other things being equal).

What's more, 250 Gb isn't all that much when you start loading DV/ HDV and get a few projects lying around. If you want to add more it simply makes no sense not using Raid.


CS

There are other solutions besides a big RAID
 

Like a little RAID. Look at products like a G-RAID, a little 2-drive Firewire box that has worked great for us. If you ant a step up from that, look at some of the small eSATA RAIDs, like CalDigit. Once again, this is a 2-drive box that is really fast, and can be purchased in sizes up to 1TB.

I've never bothered with RAID myself and do most of my HDV editing on a laptop using external USB2 hard drives, which aren't technically ideal but have proved adequate to get the job done. Note that straight HDV capture requires less than 3.5 MB/sec sustained write speed, which is well within the capability of any modern hard drive. If you're capturing to some of the 'intermediate' editing formats (e.g. Cineform) the capture bandwidth can jump to 10 MB/sec or more, but that's still easy for any decent drive. For editing, the more complex your projects the more likely you are to need a RAID setup for good performance, and as Chris said you can run some tests to see for yourself how much difference it makes.

But all things considered, processing power is more important for HDV editing than hard drive speed.

IMO RAID is overkill for HDV. The codec taxes the CPU a heck of a lot more than it does the storage. It's HD but at DV data rates.


-A

Fw800
 

I've been using FW800 drives and they work just fine. I've digitized in both HDV and AIC.