getting Mac Pro -How to configure the drives?

Getting a MAC Pro with FCP 6 to get ready for changing over to HD.
What is the best way to format the drives?

this system will have:

OS 10.5

32GB memory

(4) 1 terabyte hard drives (Xeon) Quad Core 5400 series processors

no capture card (going with firewire and USB 2.0)

and the latest version of FCP 6

I cannot in good conscience recommend using an internal stripe set that's that big. For a few months I got by using a two-disk stripe set of 750 GB drives as my framestore, but every day I was acutely aware of how hosed I'd have been if I'd dropped a disk. Now I'm on a RAID-5 device from G-Tech. Caldigit RAIDs come highly recommended as well; I'm ordering one for the other edit suite here later today, in fact.

But if you're absolutely committed to setting up your system that way, partition your first drive into quarters, and use one of those quarters as your system disk. A system partition bigger than a couple hundred gigs or so has, by some accounts, been linked to overall stability problems, but most of all, you'll just be wasting a ton of space if you don't partition it. Keep a second partition empty, then when the next major update comes out, install it on that partition while preserving your known-good configuration just in case. What you do with the other partitions is up to you.

Your other three drives should be striped into a single volume. Don't put anything on that volume that you can't afford to lose.

BEST way to format them? Well, depends on the type of HD you will be working with. Leaving them as separate drives is the safest way to go, and works well with DVCPRO HD, HDV and XDCAM HD footage. Might do well for ProRes as well. But uncompressed HD and Red RAW files require lots of SPEED...and with the drives alone the best you can do is a STRIPED Raid...Raid 0. But this is dangerous....lose one drive, ALL your data is gone.

BUT...I highly recommend the CalDigit RAID CARD. Makes the drives a protected Raid 5 (lose a drive, your data is still safe) with slightly less capacity.

DO NOT INCLUDE YOUR SYSTEM DRIVE in any raid you make. The media drives and system drive must be separate. So this means that you are limited to three of the four slots. Unless you are brave and hack the system to get a drive in the second optical bay thus voiding your warranty. I did that.


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Ditto what Shane said. I had an internal RAID0, lost a drive, lost three years worth of work. I had backed up much of it but it still tales a lot of time finding what I want.

I'd recommend individual drives and if you feel the need for speed I'd recommend an external RAID5.

whoa - slow down a bit. sounds to me that youre coming at this with a lot half-baked info.

first off, 32gig of ram is INSANE and unless youre doing true 3d animation or a lot of super high end after effects work - it wont even be used. i have 16gig in my macpro and for FCP its overkill, and is PLENTY for after effects.

and 4 internal 1 tb drives, also kinda ill-advised. follow shanes (and my) path and go with caldigit external drives. what i did was get their 4 channel fasta e-sata card and i have a variety of e-sata drives. two caldigit arrays and a number of stand alone drives.

firewire and usb2.0 are not advisable for HD with FCP. i use firewire800 with dvcproHD and it works great! but NOT firewire400 and definitely not usb2.0 - as usb 2.0 specs are based on burst transfers and not a continual stream.

personally (just my suggestion) i also wouldnt partition your boot drive. just get say a 500 gig (1tb is too big for an efficient system drive) format it "mac extended journaled" and keep your apps and system stuff ONLY on it.

i would suggest a heartier video card than the one it ships with. thats a cheap and helpful upgrade.

- and back to the ram issue, most people think that dumping ram into your machine will make all the difference. dont get me wrong, it does help a lot of things but 32gig is overkill. and it wont make much noticeable difference in FCP performance. a few weeks ago, i took my new octocore macpro and upped its stock 2gig ram to 16gig. it resulted in a 2 second improvement in FCP render time. then i changed my drive interface from firewire800 to e-sata - THAT resulted in a THIRTY SECOND improvement.

i'll shut up now.

32GB RAM? How did I miss that? HOLY COW...that would cost more than the computer itself!

Dude...too too TOO much. 8GB maybe...I make a living with 6GB.


www.shanerosseditor.com

Listen to THE EDIT BAY Podcast on iTunes
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Yeah, wow, I glossed over the RAM too. It's actually not as bad as you might think, Shane; a 32 GB kit is running about $1,200 from OWC right now.

I think we've had this conversation before, but just for the record: I have 16 GB in my system, and I do a lot of 32-bit float compositing in HD in After Effects, and I cannot render on eight processors without running out of RAM. With only 16 GB of RAM, I have to tune the render engine down to five or six processors (I forget exactly) so it can run without using all available RAM and forcing the system to swap, which slows everything down.

But After Effects is a special case. When it renders, it can allocate something like three gigabytes of memory per processor. Final Cut doesn't work like that. Yes, for an edit system, 16 GB is overkill. Eight would be plenty. I wouldn't even recommend going less than 1 GB of RAM per processor in your system, though. That's just my rule of thumb.

Lose some RAM, and buy a capture card with it. With FW, you're gonna be limited to HDV, and DVCPro HD. Maybe XDCAmHD.

I'd look at the Radeon HD 3870 graphics card as folks seem to be pleased with it.

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Michael Horton
-------------------

Thank you all for your input. You really are most helpful me. I'm a stooge who knows nothing. You guys will keep me from going off the deep end.

Jeff Harrell Wrote:
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> But After Effects is a special case. When it
> renders, it can allocate something like three
> gigabytes of memory per processor. Final Cut
> doesn't work like that. Yes, for an edit system,
> 16 GB is overkill. Eight would be plenty. I
> wouldn't even recommend going less than 1 GB of
> RAM per processor in your system, though. That's
> just my rule of thumb.

Let's not forget that very soon we will have Snow Leopard (and maybe a new FCP version) and that may change everything... Up to now most of our apps make poor use of the 4x and 8x machines. With Grand Central all that will change and I'm hopeful that Apple will lead the pack with a new version of Studio that really cashes in on high processor-count machines.

All this hopefully will coincide with the release of the new Nehalem-based (16 core?) machines.

Eh, that's really only kind of half true. There are a ton of different moving parts on a Final Cut system. The process of decoding and playing back compressed footage, for instance, isn't handled by Final Cut at all. It's handled by the Quicktime software framework, and more specifically by the Quicktime component that supports the compressor in question. One of the reasons ProRes works so well on eight-processor systems is that the Quicktime component for it was carefully designed to scale. You can get close to twice the real-time performance on an eight-processor system as you can on a four-processor system.

That said, Final Cut itself ? the application, not the various pieces of Quicktime that support it ? is a very big and relatively old piece of software. I would not expect to see a major rewrite to take advantage of new operating-system features any time soon. Definitely not in Final Cut 7. Maybe in Final Cut 8. That's my guess.

Thanks for your input. I think I have a better direction to go now.