Raid!
 

Hey Everyone...

I have researched this extensively and still cannot find a good answer, so hoping one of you can shed some light!

Right now I don't use any back up solution - I have a zillion hard drives, internal and external and I have an older Lacie raid 5 array that I use for my music and graphics storage (and storing other important things).

I edit on Premiere CS4 and will be moving up to CS5 eventually.

I am starting to film tapeless (mainly with DSLRs) so now I really need a good backup solution - and I need a lot more storage in general. I thought about doing the simple copy the raw files to 2 separate disks but when I get home late from a wedding and have one the next day too this is a step I may forget...so then I thought about maybe having a raid configuration. I researched 1, 1+0 and 5. I know 0 is the best but there is no backup. I don't like the idea of 1 or 1+0 because you are basically loosing 1 or 2 harddrives just for mirroring. My favorite raid is 5 due to the fact that you get somewhere around 70% use of your storage space and have redundancy.

Now here is the question - everywhere I read says raid 5 is great for editing and then everywhere else I read says its not great for editing.

I want to buy this; Newegg.com - SANS DIGITAL TowerRAID TR4UT-B 4 Bay SATA to USB2.0 / eSATA Hardware RAID 5 Enclosure (Black)

It's a hardware raid solution - and throw in 4-2tb 32mb cache, 7200rpm drives. My question is - will this be a good solution for huge storage and allow me enough speed to edit right from it? Or can I even go cheaper and get a software raid solution using an E-Sata portmultiplier (1x speed)?

I am so confused as everybody has different info!

Thank you so much in advance!!

Should be fast enough if you connect it through eSATA. On my system I have 5x 1TB drives on the motherboard set to software RAID5. This works fine for my editing needs (EX1, DSLRs). I decided to go with RAID5 because its the safest for my data. Granted I would prefer to edit on RAID 0 as this is the fastest way to go about working but also the most likely to fail. If you have tons of money edit on a RAID 0 system and have a separate NAS running RAID 5 for back-up. If can't afford it RAID 5 will be fine for editing.