Hard Drive Question at DVinfo.net

Alastair Brown · May 8th, 2007, 02:06 PM

My old system used 2 seperate physical drives setup as seperate drives on seperate channels, which I always understood to be the most efficient way of doing it.

On my new system I have setup two 500Gb (7200rpm 16Mb cache)drives as a striped Raid 0 array i.e. functioning as one drive.

Question is.........would I be any better off having a single smaller faster (10,000rpm) for my system drive and using the striped 500's as the storage drives.

Not sure if the seperate physical drive/channel argument still holds true for SATA?

Ron Evans · May 8th, 2007, 04:12 PM

Raid 0 is really for temporary stuff as any problem with either drive means all data is lost. So don't put your operating system on a Raid 0 system. Have a smaller drive for the boot and program storage and use a backup program so that you could recover. I have a 120G boot, a 160G for temp files ( and also the backup image of the boot drive), 3 x 200G storage drives, also a couple of 250G USB drives that I sometimes use if needed. I have not seen the need for a Raid unless you are editing uncompressed video or lots of layers of HDV you probably don't need it either for speed or storage with modern drives.

Ron Evans

May 8th, 2007, 02:06 PM	#1
Alastair Brown Major Player Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Glasgow/Scotland Posts: 626	Hard Drive Question My old system used 2 seperate physical drives setup as seperate drives on seperate channels, which I always understood to be the most efficient way of doing it. On my new system I have setup two 500Gb (7200rpm 16Mb cache)drives as a striped Raid 0 array i.e. functioning as one drive. Question is.........would I be any better off having a single smaller faster (10,000rpm) for my system drive and using the striped 500's as the storage drives. Not sure if the seperate physical drive/channel argument still holds true for SATA?

May 8th, 2007, 04:12 PM	#2
Ron Evans Inner Circle Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada Posts: 4,220	Raid 0 is really for temporary stuff as any problem with either drive means all data is lost. So don't put your operating system on a Raid 0 system. Have a smaller drive for the boot and program storage and use a backup program so that you could recover. I have a 120G boot, a 160G for temp files ( and also the backup image of the boot drive), 3 x 200G storage drives, also a couple of 250G USB drives that I sometimes use if needed. I have not seen the need for a Raid unless you are editing uncompressed video or lots of layers of HDV you probably don't need it either for speed or storage with modern drives. Ron Evans