I have a SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB SATA I am building a new computer for my son to store and edit...

[G+_Paul Fransen]

I have a SanDisk Extreme PRO 480GB SATA I am building a new computer for my son to store and edit his pictures and GoPro videos. I want to use the SanDisk as boot drive and add two more drives One to store files on and the other to mirror the second drive. Can I do this with Raid 1. Or should I use Raid 10 and add some more drives. Plus what are some good drives.

Thanks

Paul

[G+_Travis Hershberger]

RAID 1 will be fine.  Read performance is improved when adding more drives to a mirror set, but not write performance.  So I don't think adding a heap of drives will speed things up much, and you shouldn't have problems finding drives large enough.

 

I'd recommend drives from Hitachi (HGST), WD RED series, or Seagate NAS series drives, in that order.  If you are purchasing the drives for this I'd also recommend purchasing only 1 from the same vendor.  Why?  So you get drives that were made in different batches.  Drives from the same batch tend to have mechanical failures around the same time (if you really want to hear about it I can give you some real life examples that happened to me.)  So choose your favorite suppliers and order 1 from each. B+H (www.bhphotovideo.com) is one of my favorites in addition to the normal newegg.com and tigerdirect.com.

 

I assume you'll be using software RAID provided by either the operating system or motherboard?  I'd just use the features built into Windows to do this.  (NOT recommended for providing server storage.)  The reason for this is if something happens to the computer but the drives themselves stay intact you can put them in another system with the same version of Windows and the file system will still be intact.  (Same thing with Linux and its mdadm utility.)  If you use the motherboard RAID you would need to find an exact (firmware as well) version of the motherboard to move the drives and still have the file system intact.  Honestly Linux/BSD/UNIX does this much better than Windows, but for your purposes you should be fine.

 

Don't forget to keep backups around in addition to the RAID, after all, RAID is not backup!

[G+_Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ]

Paul Fransen Take this for what it's worth... It's based on my own personal preference for storage setups on video editing machines.

 

Using the Sandisk 480GB as an OS drive seems to be a waste of space if you intend to keep all your assets on a separate drive. 

 

I'd look into purchasing a second, smaller, SSD... perhaps a Kingston KC300 or a Samsung 830 Pro. -- Both of those are blazing fast and perfect as OS drives. You can find the 120GB models for ~$60

 

You'd then have all 480GB for storing "active" assets, which means that you wouldn't have to copy them on and off your SSD during editing. -- I use a similar setup on my editing rigs and it's BLAZING fast. (Especially if you render FROM the SSD storage disk to the SSD OS drive.)

 

For hot backup, I'd stay away from the WD RED drives unless you're actually going to use them in a NAS. You'd probably be better served going with a set of WD Greens.

 

- Personally... I'd skip putting a set of rotating drive into the system, and instead opt for a NAS (with RD REDs) that can be used to archive assets as they are no longer needed.

[G+_Paul Fransen]

Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ I appreciate the info that sounds like the way to go