What is the best RAID configuration for a MacPro as a Logic User?

Well, both Mirrored and Striped have their pros and cons. If you use mirrored, it will offer no better performance than the spec'ed drive along with it's sata bus speed. The plus point is, if one drive goes down, you have the second as a backup as the complete contents of one drive are mirrored on the other.

With striped you will get a performance boost because all files (for example a single project) will get written across both drives and hence split the load on the drives and the SATA busses. The drawback is that you'll have to make sure you have a good, regular backup schedule in place because when one of the drives goes to drive heaven, you're going to be stuffed without a full backup of both drives.

Exactly what performance boost you'd get will depend on your project, number of files, size of files, fragmentation of files, track count etc. You may find it would be easier to use the 3 drives straight, with no raid and have:

HD 1: OS and Apps. No samples at all.

HD2: Audio Files for Logic projects

HD3: Reason, Ableton, Logic etc instrument sample library

HD4: Video and bouncing.

Which is what I ended up doing although I use HD4 as an interchangeable backup for HD1 and 2.

There is no universal answer to this as each must make their own choice based on their preferences and needs. Mirrored will give you full backup but on-site, in machine backup. Not much good if something untoward and drastic happens to the physical machine. I think a few people toy with striped RAID but fall on the side of using the drives straight, as in their projects they don't see a big enough gain over splitting the data across your 3 remaining drives without RAID. Studios that seriously consider raid often go out and get a dedicated raid that can offer more variations than raid 0 or raid 1 (Striped and Mirrored) and better throughput.

I hope this helps a little and not just added to the dilemma.

Hi

Whilst mirrored drives give some protection against individual drive failure, they do NOT take into account 'pilot error'. If you delete a file by accident, it will be deleted from both drives.

I'd suggest a more manual backup strategy, if need be combined with a mirrored RAID?

CCT

@CCTM. All good valuable points.

@seano33. I'm not familiar at all with Ableton and have only occasionally used Reason. Reason would allow you to put the samples/refills etc wherever you wanted and point the app towards them. I would think (although I may be completely wrong) that if you had a laptop with Reason and the samples on the same drive but you pointed your laptops version of Reason to the local sound samples, you'd be ok. As I said though, I'm not exactly up to speed on this.

The sending of sessions to other producers has always caused some issues since the advent of DAW's and not just with sound sample libraries. For example, I really like the Waves CLA76 compressor and the SSLG strip. If I send my Logic session to another producer or mix engineer and they haven't got those plugs, they are stuffed. The same thing applies to the sound sample libraries, especially the ones outside of Logic (because with Logic you can save all the assets and send the whole thing to someone else).

What I tend to do before sending multi-track sessions to other people is bounce down any audio/midi with stuff like compression, EQ but not reverb and delays etc. It all really depends on who I am sending it to and what they want to do with it. I certainly bounce all midi down to audio because the person receiving the files may not even be using Logic.

For your own use, it shouldn't be hard to duplicate a working system on a laptop but sending stuff out is a different matter.

I think you should decide on a method of allocating your HD's for what is going to work best for you and your working method and then go from there.

You are right in that you shouldn't really install an app (that has a proper installer) to anywhere but the Applications folder in /Applications.

Mirroring doesn't improve performance because you're not actually splitting the load across drives or SATA busses, it's mirroring, ie, the same data going to two different places. With striped you have different data coming from two different drives simultaneously hence relieving the load on each drive/buss.

I hope we're not getting further away from a solution for you, but it is good that you are thinking along these lines, thinking ahead and what is going to work best for your workflow. There is not, unfortunately, one correct answer.