Hello All,
Hope this is the right place; I have been shooting HDV and editing on FCP5.2. The pictures (one project shot in eastern Turkey) are beautiful. But it is a lot of information; I have had a LaCie 500MB crash repeatedly (maybe operator error or power supply) lots of dropped frames and stutters on the pictures.

A couple of my colleagues tell me that a RAID can solve some of these problems, providing speed and reduancy in case a drive goes south. There appear to be three versions of RAIDS to feed video: SCSI, firewire, and fiber.

I have been looking at a number of web sites, and I need a little guidance.
Best conversation I had was with Huge Systems.

They have a 1.25TB RAID, 4GB Fibre 4104 Cost $4184
I need either an AJA KONA Card or Black Magic Cost $1000 and up
I need an Atto FC42X5 Card Cost $1200

Total $6384

This would all plug into a G5 2.5/2.5RAM

The project upcoming includes three pieces, which probably means digitizing about 300-400 GB of video.

Am I on target? Or is the fiber version overkill? Is this enough storage? The fiber seems to provide the most speed with a better pipeline than SCSI or firewire.

What do you all think?

Regards,


Jack Hubbard

I can't really offer much advice, but I can give you a little experience. Either learn as much about Raid repair, or know someone that does know.

I took a system in to get the MB replaced, which was the first mistake. A mysterious ailment (Oops! They a drive...) killed the system HDD, so the *technician* took one of my two Raid drives, formatted it, and put a bootleg OS on it. My array was mirrored, so I am hoping the info is in tact. Problem is, I haven't any idea of how to rebuild it. The one, hopefully unmolested HDD, sits unused until I can find someone that knows how to rebuild a mirrored array.

Best wishes to you though.

Thanks, Keith, that's a start.

Jack

Are you using the LaCie to edit? Or is it just as a storage device?

I certainly wouldn't use it as an 'editing' drive!!

What about SATA RAID? It's cheaper, and with the advances made in drive technology you can set-up a fast and large SATA RAID that'll provide all that you require without breaking the bank. SATA RAID with 7,200rpm drives is plenty fast enough for HDV editing, and it provides redundancy with arrays of 3 disks or more...

SCSI has the advantage of more RAID modes, but unless you require the specific RAID modes it offers, it's not going to be such a radical improvement over SATA RAID - given the extra cost.

Hiya Steve,

Yep, guilty as charged. Been lucky so far, but my friend Tom Wolsky sez they have proven unreliable, which I have discovered, much to my chagrin. How about Wiebe drives? I hear good things about them.

Jack