Media Drives

Time to buy a couple of more working drives...I have several GRaids...very reliable, but now taken over by Hitachi, as I understand it. What's the running favorite now, in the same price range? Looking for 4TB, not minis...should Thunderbolt be a consideration?

Thanks!

Caldigit VR is a good one. I have one at home, and two at work.


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I have been using a CalDigit VR 2 TB unit for a few years with no issues and yesterday I just received my new CalDigit VR2 6 TB unit ($759.05 / Free shipping / no tax) from Safe Harbor:

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When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Is there any overwhelming reason to put together my first RAID with SSD drives? They are considerably more expensive and the storage is smaller than a standard drive. Basically I'm trying to stay under $1500, but speed up my system to handle all-HD workflow. Is internal raid preferrable to external? Thanks.

My system:

OS 10.6.8 (Snow L)
FCP 7
factory standard Nvidia card for 1st gen. quad tower
5 gigs RAM
2.66 Ghz
bus speed 1.33 ghz

2 internal drives:
main 250 gig (OS & apps)
2nd 650 gigs (media storage)

An SSD as your system drive will speed up your boot time, app loading and virtual memory swapping so you will notice generally quicker workflow where the system disk is involved.

SSDs for media storage are great but as you said VERY expensive per GB but its coming down all the time.

You need to work out what your needs are.

How much storage do you think you'll need at any one time for the sort of work you do? HD footage and renders take up a lot more space than SD so this should be your starting point.

You have a budget so try to get the best bang for your buck.

Think about expansion and backup too. I use an eSATA HDD "toaster" dock to backup to separate drives and then put in storage.

Last question..

Ask yourself if you want to build your own and get more for your money or buy off-the-shelf and get single point after sales service.

I would suggest you should look at getting a decent RAID card such as the Areca 1880x and an external 4 or 8 bay SAS enclosure with HDDs such as the Hitachi Deskstar or UltraStar drives.



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Quote
quickwatson said:
Basically I'm trying to stay under $1500

Well...that rules out an SSD RAID. The 512 GB SSD HD in my Macbook Pro was an $1100 upgrade by itself (with the 8 GB RAM upgrade I added, this machine beats the 8-Core I use at work). For well below that price (as in the one I posted above), I would get a 6 TB CalDigit VR2 and run it RAID1 for mirrored protection handling ProRes 1080p without breaking a sweat

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I've been using three different OWC Mercury Elite 4tb for the last 14 months without any problem at all. Every interface possible. Great customer service.