RAID 0 on Sonnet with Firmtek controller
 

I have the Sonnet 5 bay port multiplier with Firmtek PCI-x controller card. I want to set up two 500 gig drives as a RAID 0, using the disk utility.

I can select 32k to 256k block size. Should I use the 256k or is there a downside to that?

I'll be editing multi-cam hdv, possibly first converting the hdv to ProRes Std. 8 bit. I'll be capturing 4.5 hours of hdv footage or capturing same as ProRes Std. over fw.

Final project length will be 1.5 hours. I want to get the benefit of speed without sacrificing too much disk space.

The larger block size allows for more rapid throughput. The downside is that the smallest file you can write to disk (ie. a .txt file with 1 character) will occupy 256k, instead of 32k. To the best of my knowledge, that's about it. Seek time and write time should be at their fastest with a larger block size.

block size . . a happy medium?
 

Thanks. I wonder if there's a happy medium for video editing (8 bit ProRes 422). eg. how about some small render or other small files that might occur in a video project . . . I guess the disk space would fill up much more quickly at 256k. With less space I guess things would slow down, or worse, when the disc gets too full.

So maybe with a lot of footage, something like 128k might give good enough speed without using excess space? What do you think?