RAID for speed....for use with home recording

Hi

If all you want is performance with no redundancy then use what's built-in. Disk Utility > RAID. With DU you get a number of limited options. Basically RAID 0 (Stripe) and RAID 1 (Mirror). RAID 0 takes however many drives you - in your case 2 - and combines them into one larger volume. The drives should be the same size and ideally same manufacturer. For example 2x500GB Drives will give you roughly 1TB of usable space. However if either drive was to fail you've lost all your data. It's important therefore if you're going to use RAID 0 you need to practise a good backup strategy and stick to it. Assuming the data is important to you? RAID 1 takes the 2x500GB Drives and gives you roughly 500GB of usable space. This is good for redundancy - in case one of the drives was to fail for example - but is not very good for performance. All data is written to both drives simultaneously. Alternatively you could purchase a large external hard drive and use Firewire 800 or eSATA instead. I know of some sites that do this and it works fairly well.

Beyond this you begin to move into dedicated RAID Units with further options such as RAID 5, RAID 50, RAID 6 etc. In some film/studios/tv companies interested in producing hi-end video you'll probably see the use of dedicated SAN products such as XSAN with a beefed up network designed to cope.

You may want to read this recent thread as it might give you an idea of what to expect?

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10245070&#10245070

A lot of course depends on what kind of Video you're planning to produce? As ever your mileage will vary.

My 2p.

Tony

Xserve RAID is a Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (FC SAN) storage hardware product, and it has been discontinued. The replacement product is the Promise SAN storage controller series, and that is probably out of your price range.

As for RAID...

RAID-0 is also known as striping. Clumps of data are written to each disk, so you end up with the aggregate speed of two disks. But if one disk fails, you're rolling in your backups.

RAID-1 is also known as mirroring or shadowing, and you can survive the loss of one disk. Read performance is decent, write performance is slower as you have to write to both disks.

RAID-5 is a format best avoided; it's an old scheme from when disks were dinky and expensive. This format engenders massive I/O recovery loads on failures (approximately 80% of your total I/O bandwidth into the array is consumed for hours, and potentially as long as overnight for a bigger array), and the load increases as disk capacity increases, and (surprisingly) prone to blowing a second disk during recovery due to the I/O load, and leaving you with a catastrophic array failure. The bigger your disks (or the more unstable your disks), the more likely a second error will arise during recovery, meaning that RAID-5 is a format best avoided. It's comparatively slow. The Apple hardware RAID-5 controller performance isn't comparable with mid- or upper-end SAN-based controller RAID performance, in my experience with both. (Various of those SAN controllers have fully virtualized storage, so the whole concept of RAID is, well, rather different.)

RAID-6 (various names) is a variant of RAID-5, with additional replicated data. If you want RAID-5, then RAID-6 is usually a better choice as it's less prone to blowing a disk during recovery.

RAID-10 is a combination of RAID-0 and RAID-1, where you have striping across a mirror. It's a decent-performing RAID controller, and it doesn't have the massive recovery load.

RAID-50 is a combination of RAID-0 and RAID-5.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

RAID is not an archival strategy. If your data is important, you need a copy not on your RAID array.

Best bang for your money is probably a used Intel-based server of some ilk; the QPI-based Xeon boxes are screaming-fast boxes. A box swap for whatever G5 box this is. Spending a whole lot on a G5-class box isn't going to be particularly effective.

Best "cheap" bang for your money is probably a SSD; your existing capacity is in the same range as the entry-level SSD drives. A disk upgrade. Below that, you're left with either an internal upgrade, or (depending on which G5 box you have) a PCI-X-based, or a FireWire-based or USB-based external storage, in decreasing relative order of performance.

As for home recording, if you're running a G5-class box, then pretty much anything out there will work; performance will probably be adequate. Once you figure out what your I/O load and your CPU load might be, you'll probably either be happy with a minimal (disk) upgrade, or you'll be looking for a new box. You'll inevitably be looking at a box upgrade over time as the PPC gear falls off the supported list for the products you're using, however.

Wills,
Consider using SSD hard drives.

Not only for storage, but also for the operating system.

In the UK, I can pick up a 60GB drive for under £90. Two of those in RAID 0 will be super quick.

Not saying they are suitable for long-term storage of audio or video, but as temp. working drives they are incredible.

If you are able to get an external e-SATA box and a controller to suit, you will be smiling.