700 Dollar Raid Solution
 

So I can't really afford one of those 3,000 dollar storage solutions. So I decided to just make my own. All came to around 700 bucks and lives inside my computer. 1 Raid Controller card, 4 HD's.

Raid 10

http://img689.imageshack.us/img689/161/raid10.jpg

Raid 0
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/8082/raid0.jpg

O.O works for me.

I've never been a fan of Raids..
I'd check out "Drobo's" for when you're starting to need more space. They're very flexible and amazing if you ask me.

Unless they've changed, I've heard that Drobos are only meant for long term storage. I thought about getting one about a year ago. While researching, I saw a lot of complaints about how slow they were. Sometimes it would several days to complete a build, and if you ever have to swap out a drive, don't plan on adding anything to it until it finishes rebuilding the array.

If I had to buy one right now to edit from, I'd just go with one of those cool G-Raid boxes from Videoguys. Their prices seem decent, and I don't have to spend as much time puttering around with mounting drives and frustrating power supplies.

Still, that's some nice throughput you have there, James.

The DroboPro's have various interface options, one of which is iSCSI. That's very fast throughput! I still wouldn't use it for HD editing, but if a drive fails you can just swap it out with a new one without ANY downtime! I have a DroboPro at work and a regular Drobo at home. I use both the same way. I have a 3TB RAID 0 array connected via SATA on my editing machines which gives me more than enough space and speed to edit my projects. Once I am done with a project, I'll completely archive it off the RAID onto the Drobo for archiving. I'll also do an initial copy of all fotage and project files to the Drobo, just in case. When connected via iSCSI at work the process is very quick. At home, connected via USB 2.0, it's obviously slower but very manageable as I'll do my backup in the evening and have a cuppa while waiting. If things go kablooie, I might loose some things, but not all. All in all, this type of setup works best for me.

My recommendation, simple RAID 0 for editing, nothing extravagant, and secure backup media.

Thanks for the information.

Paul Hudson
LizardlandVideo.com
Phoenix Video Production

If anyone would like specifics on what hardware I used (if your trying to build one yourself) I'll gladly explain.

Yes. Please do... I was thinking of doing something similar my self. But what about a scratch disk - working partition. I know that makes up for a lot of drives, but, wouldn't you need one?