New internal HD

[Anders Peev]

Thanks! That really clears the sky!

For a moment a saw myself scanning the market for the right screws to fit my mac.

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Anders

[HCMarkus]

Storagereview.com

[Anders Peev]

Thank you all for great input!

I went with twisted toms idea about few platters making less noise. I ordered 2 Barracuda 7200.12 1TB, they have only 2 platters each.

Have a great week!

/

Anders

[Anders Peev]

By the way,

I'm planning to put the new drives in striped RAID according to the advice from Six string geek. This would mean that the will function as one virtuall unit together? I'm going to put my projects and eventually some samples them. Apps and plugs stay on the boot drive right? Is it better to have projects on separate drives from the samples and skip the RAID thing?

/

Anders

[HCMarkus]

Striped RAID (RAID 0) is fast, but increaes the risk of data loss should a drive fail. If one of your striped drives dies, ALL your data is GONE. And though loss of your VI's stock samples is no big deal (they can simply be re-loaded from CD or DVD) you might be a "tad sad" if all your audio recordings were taken from you without warning. As one who suffered drive death only two weeks ago, I assure you: Drive die. Often without any warning. Often before the warranty has expired. ALWAYS at the worst possible time!

SO... if you are gonna' RAID 0 your audio recordings, your better have a backup plan.

I would be inclined to recommend the JBOD approach in your situation. "Just a Bunch Of Discs/Drives" is simple to set up. Allocate VI samples between drives, allowing for your audio recordings (one stereo voice from a VI places about the same demands on your drive as one stereo audio track from DP) to split the load as evenly as possible. Set up a backup partition on the drive your don't store your projects on. Set up another backup partition on your system drive. Then back up your projects on both for security. Also, clone your system drive and keep a copy on another drive, so when your system drive dies, you won't lose all your programs and settings.

Or run Time Machine and backup everything on a big ol' firewire or network drive.

[SixStringGeek]

Striped RAID (RAID 0) is fast, but increaes the risk of data loss should a drive fail. If one of your striped drives dies, ALL your data is GONE.

Very true. I backup active projects to an additional external drive regularly and burn archive DVD's of finished projects. Definitely you need a backup plan.

[newrigel]

WD Velociraptor! They can beat out SSD's in certain tasks for the price.
IMHO, I wouldn't go the SSD route yet (unless you got the quid) until they come down in price. Plus... not all SSD's are as fast as you'd think an SSD should be! Only the really expensive SSD's can compete with the speeds of the Velociraptors (a mechanism) he-he.

[Anders Peev]

Thanks HC and everybody else!

I have 2 firewire externals. I'll seriously think over my backup plan before the drives arrive. If I choose to go with the RAID option, is it still worth to install a 4th drive to put either VIs or audio on it? To keep VIs separated from audio?

RAID will be faster than JBOD in some sense, right? What should be the best option to put on the RAID-drives? Audio or VIs? Or did I lose myself somewhere?

/

Anders

[Jim]

Thanks HC and everybody else!

I have 2 firewire externals. I'll seriously think over my backup plan before the drives arrive. If I choose to go with the RAID option, is it still worth to install a 4th drive to put either VIs or audio on it? To keep VIs separated from audio?

RAID will be faster than JBOD in some sense, right? What should be the best option to put on the RAID-drives? Audio or VIs? Or did I lose myself somewhere?

/

Anders

Most flavors of RAID are faster than JBOD. Before you get into RAID, I suggest you determine whether you really need one. FW and ESATA are plenty fast for streaming and loads of audio tracks. RAID is more geared for video and other enterprises that require lots of data fast. Besides, most RAID enclosures are really loud and aren't fit for the same room you're mixing in. If you do decide to go that route, and plan to put it in your mixing environment, you'd be well-advised to check the noise specs.

[Anders Peev]

Besides, most RAID enclosures are really loud and aren't fit for the same room you're mixing in. If you do decide to go that route, and plan to put it in your mixing environment, you'd be well-advised to check the noise specs.

Thanks, That's an important one to me! I have my Mac Pro in the same room as my mixing environment even though it's almost 3 meters away thanks to very long cables. I will go with the JABD-option and pass on the noisy RAID. I got the two barracuda 7200.12 (1TB each) this morning. Right now I'm formatting them with the highest option of security (I can hardly remember what it was in swedish, 35 times slower). I thought this was the best choice and it takes forever. I ve got 41 hours left to format the first drive!

I seems like I chose the default extended journal. Hope I did right!

/

Anders

[Jim]

I just read an article that states the Sonnet Fusion DX800 is a pretty quiet RAID enclosure. I have an Enhance ProAVO DIY RAID enclosure, and it's pretty quiet, as RAIDs go. No louder than my MacPro, for sure.

Doing a low level format writes over your entire drive. That's why it takes a while. The benefit of that is that it can find bad sectors and tell the whathcamacallit (sorry for being so technical ) to avoid them.

As I understand it, Journaling is mostly for IT environments, and not needed for music, etc. I format mine with the simple Mac Extended.

Have fun!

[Anders Peev]

Thanks Jim!

I'm glad to hear that I did the right thing. The drive's been ticking for 24 hours and it's only on step 9 out of 35. I'll format the second drive in the same way apart from the journal thing. But I guess it doesn't kill that the first one is journaled.

/

Anders

[HCMarkus]

You don't need to format using secure erase, which is what it sounds like you are doing. That is only an issue if you are over-writing old data you don't want the spies to EVER be able to access! Sicne your new drives don;t have any data on them, you are just wasting time. Just do a simple format, it takes seconds, and GO!

PS: Consider partitioning schemes now, before you start filling your drives.

[HCMarkus]

Journaling is fine. No sgnificant performance hit in my experience and research.