Hard Disks... the other HD
 

I've shot a lot of HDV footage recently, and I'm looking to buy some hard drives for a S-ATA RAID 0 configuration. Are there any drives out there that are particularly recommended? Will the difference between a 16 MB cache and an 8 MB cache be significant for this type of application? (i.e., files on the order of 100s of MB to GB?).

I believe my motherboard (http://usa.asus.com/products/mb/sock...d/overview.htm) supports RAID in hardware, so on that end I should be prepared. (?)

Any recommendations are welcome... To keep things in context, I will likely be buying from here:

http://www.canadacomputers.com/cc/in...md=pl&id=HD.96

so anything from their selection would be preferred. Obviously I will be getting as much capacity as I can afford - so this is more about reliability and suitability than anything else.

I'd probably go with the Maxtor Diamond Max 10's
 

Hi Steven,

I just put 3 Maxline III 300G SATA drives in my G5 at work (2 internal 1 external) using the FirmTek (SeriTek) PCI-X controller. These are the server version of the DiamondMax 10's. I have 1 other Maxtor 300G SATA drive in an external case with the other new drive. I've been using them for about a week editing SD stuff and they seem very fast. I'll take SATA over external Firewire any day.

I'm editing a 24-part series of nominal 1 hour shows that will end up on 8 DVD-9 disks, so it's nice having some room to breathe.

I think the Maxtor SATA 300G 16Mb cache is one of the best drives out right now.

paul

Steven,

I put a couple Samsung 160GB drives in a raid 0 sometime back with Asus MB. I later put one in Home Theater PC. I've seen good references on them. They have 3 year warranty, and are ABSOLUTELY quiet. They were about $90 at Newegg.

HD's
 

If you’re planning on storing for long term, you may want to look into a hardware raid5 solution, the problem with raid 0 is that if one disk goes out, you loose all your data. With raid 5 you don't have to worry about any single disk going to hell.

I had a major problem back a few years, and spent a good 100 hours recovering from a raid 0 array that crashed just because of a power surge.

If you just using it for editing and temporary space, I’m sure it will work fine, that's what it is good for.

I personally have a raid 5 setup with 4-300gb drives, which gives me about 900gb of space, and cost about 1400$. (may be less now) I use it for long term storage, which is a big reason why I’ll only use raid 5 now.

I'm not up on this raid stuff, but I don't understand how you can have redundancy by putting 900 GB into 1200 GB of disks. Wouldn't it be more like 600 GB?

Raid 5
 

The different levels of Raid are:

0 - Striping (every other sector is written to a different disk, which speeds it up)
1 - Mirroring (every disk has an exact mirror, which slows it down)
5 - Striping, Mirroring and Parity (A combination of 0 and 1)

The simple explanation is:

Raid 5 automatically only stores redundant data equal to the space of one drive, this makes it much faster then raid 1, but not as fault tolerant in large sets of drives.

You must have at least 3 equal sized disks, as well as a card that supports it.

There are other levels too, but none very popular.