Creative Cow Recommends RAID-5 System

Here's a review at Creative Cow that recommends a system for a RAID-5 setup from Dulce. The reviewers says that is has very good ease-of-use and is pretty darn fast.

I've written before about RAID-5 here. This Dulce system does RAID-3 too. I'm not even sure what that is. The low-down on RAID-5 is that your data is stored across an array of hard drives and if one dies, then you don't lose your data.

My latest thinking is that hard drives are so cheap, why not just backup up all your data to cheap USB hard drives. No, you can't keep working immediately if a hard drive dies, but at a quarter per GB, you can't really get much cheaper than that. Use Retrospect or your backup app of choice to backup up your media drive at night. USB isn't fast enough to edit with, but the transfer times are OK. With USB drives, it's pretty easy to expand storage, the capacity of the drives are high, and did I mention it's cheap. At least you have peace of mind if not 100% certainty that you won't miss a deadline if a hard drive dies.

The Trouble with G-RAID's

I often get asked for recommendations for hard drives for editing. Personally, I've probably bought 10 G-RAID's in the last couple of years and haven't lost any data yet (knock on wood.) Although, I know folks who have, and I have had some problems with these units.

One of my big concerns with G-RAID's is that they are RAID 0. As this article ("Don't get burned by RAID zero") points out RAID 0's have three potential points of failure--two hard drives, and the RAID controller. If any of these fails, you are hosed.

I also recently discovered that G-RAID's performance drops significantly, even dramatically, when used in a daisy-chain fashion (especially write speeds.)

At the moment, I'm still not satisfied with the alternatives for my lean budgets. So I'll probably buy some more G-RAID's in the future, but when people ask I can't whole-heartedly recommend them.