Please help: purchasing brand new comp & raid, need experienced suggestions!

[Jud Johnson]

Hi,
I own a cinematic wedding film business. We have pretty significant client traffic, about 40 wedding films per year and still growing. We've decided to switch our post production studio from FCP to Premiere. We've also decided to start from scratch and invest in all new equipment for this switch. We are an apple based facility and will stay that way. (please keep this in mind for any responses) We don't really have money/budget limitations. We don't allow budget to to bottle neck our company's efficiency or productivity. We want this editng system's speed, efficiency, and reliability to be priority #1!

On to my questions....
1. We will be purchasing a new mac pro as the primary editing station. What is the fastest, most efficient, and most reliable setup for running the entire adobe creative suite on a Mac pro? Or maybe another way of asking....what is the ultimate Mac pro setup for Adobe CS, and why?

2. I would like to go with an external raid system for all our projects. We will need 9-12TB of usable space. We need this system to be extremely reliable. What is the fastest connection for achieving the fastest read & write transfer rates between the raid system and the computer? Also, what raid systems do you recommend that will meet our needs and why?

3. I would like to make a backup of all current projects twice a week to a seperate hard drive. My business partner will then take this drive home at the end of every day for safe offsite keeping. What do you recommend we do for this? Should we buy another duplicate raid system (same as the primary) and just mirror it, or should we buy a different type/name hard drive system? Should we make the backup system Raid 0 for easier access to files if needed? How should execute the backing-up process...drag and drop, time capsule, or some third party solution?

As you can probably tell, I'm hoping to get specific equipment recommendations and well as process recommendations. Advice in any of these areas would be much appreciated!

Thanks so much!

[Richard Cavell]

Hi, mate. My opinions, for what they're worth:

1. If you're committed to Apple hardware, the current top of the line Mac Pro is a 12-core with up to 64 gig of RAM, and 8 terabytes of mechanical hard disk RAIDed. You can't have SSD and mechanical hard disk in the same unit if you want to use RAID. Cost of that is about $8,800 AU. You can get custom-built Mac Pros. I've seen one with 24 internal hard disks.

I'm currently using Adobe CS on a MacBook Pro, and it can be very slow. It works, of course, it's just very slow.

2. If you want an external storage solution that has serious speed, you're looking at Thunderbolt. 12 terabyte RAID that goes about 600 megabytes/second is $2700 AU. I'm trying to convince my boss to buy a 16 terabyte iStoragePro that goes about 800 megabytes/second for $3300. The cheaper RAIDs just don't have that kind of speed, so don't be fooled into buying them.

3. Since you say money's not really an issue, I would buy an external Thunderbolt RAID that was at least as large as the primary RAID and my computer put together, and use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the system. An incremental regular backup will complete in reasonable time. Take advantage of Time Machine, too.

If you're serious that money is no object, I'd consider setting up a Time Machine volume that is some distance away but connected via Gigabit Ethernet, and in a fireproof/waterproof environment.

Richard

[Angelo Ucciferri]

I love my Glyph Forte RAID. It works great with Premiere and has eSata, which is a very fast 300MB/sec. They make a 12TB version, and if you bought 2, you could keep them in sync and transport 1 in a case for off site backup.

[Richard Cavell]

Just for the record, no Mac has ever had an eSATA port from the factory. You can fit them as a 3rd party item. I guess Apple's more into FireWire/Thunderbolt.

Richard