Raid for captured footage or projects?
 

Yet another question. I have read that it is best to use raided hard drives and it is best to separate audio from video. The question is, is the raid for captured footage or the scratch disks. And the audio that I am separating is that ripped music, natural sound, etc., or is it the audio that comes recorded on the dv tape with the video? We are using a raid system right now but it holds our captured footage and our project. The computer we are building will have raided hd's but I dont know what to direct there. We have a hd for the system and a hd for music also. Do I need another hd for something else? Well this sounds confusing. How bout this... our C drive is for system, our G drive is the raid set, our H drive is for audio, we could install another hd for something else. So please clear up for me what goes on the raided drives, is it captured video, audio and the scratch disks for the project? Thanks TAG

If you're working with DV, you do not need RAID at all. You might want to avoid it for the following reasons:
A- Compatibility/added complexity. RAID controllers vary widely in quality and some built-in/on-board ones will cause data corruption, or they might have excessively high CPU usage (Via). Intel RAID built into newer chipsets should be fine. *If you are using hardware acceleration cards for Premiere (i.e. RTX100), be sure to check compatibility between your RAID controller and the hardware card.

RAID also makes installing windows and using certain utilities a little harder, although that usually isn't a big deal.

B- If you are doing RAID 0 (performance) and lose a drive, you lose everything. Your risk from hard drive failure essentially doubles.

C- Un-raided drives are very, very comparable in performance. RAID makes no improvement in render speeds unless the render is like a file copy.

If you manually juggle your video files between two non-RAIDed drives, it will be faster than RAID. Read from one drive and writing to the other is a lot faster than RAID.

D- Added cost if you are buying a RAID controller.

There may have been a time where your hard drive would bottleneck your video captures, but that isn't the case nowadays with DV and 7200rpm hard drives.

Some people do suggest capturing video onto a seperate drive from your system/OS + applications. Personally I haven't had problems capturing to the system drives.

2- You don't need audio on its own drive. It's much simpler if you keep the audio together with the video.


3- Probably the most important thing is to get lots and lots of storage space. Running out is really bad, while having extra is ok since you can use it for temporary archival.

^ agreed. Raid isn't worth it for DV editing. I use a 200gb for capturing video, and I export to a 120gb drive. I keep my system drive on a 40gb. After I got my 2 extra hard drives for editing, I have had fewer problems with dropping frames while I'm capturing video - I think its because my system drive is seperate. I tend to leave my AIM and peer2peer file sharing programs running while I'm editing and capturing - maybe if I would have shut those down while capturing to a system drive, I would have had less problems.


Prices on IDE hard drives are falling at insane rates. Check the ads in the newspapers on sundays for Office Max, Office Depot, and CompUSA. Take advantage of the rebates! I got a WD 120gb for $60 after rebates, then the next week I got a WD 200gb (8mb buffer) for $50! My friend got a 250gb w/ 16mb buffer for $100 after rebates. If you can get less than 50 cents per gig you are getting a good deal!