Lacie 5big Thunderbolt (5 bay raid)

[Chris King]

Hi


I am just working on my order for my new PT10(11)HDX system.

I am having trouble finding out what external thunderbolt drive I should buy.
I like the look of the Lacie 5big Thunderbolt (5 bay raid)
http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?id=10607
I heard somewhere that PT does not work with raid drives. Is this true?

Can anyone please comment and / or suggest an alternative.

I am planning on getting the new iMac i7 with Magma T3 and the 1 x HDX plus 8-8-8 system - I would welcome any comments about that too....please.

Thanks

[stevedemena]

Originally Posted by Chris King

Hi


I am just working on my order for my new PT10(11)HDX system.

I am having trouble finding out what external thunderbolt drive I should buy.
I like the look of the Lacie 5big Thunderbolt (5 bay raid)
http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?id=10607
I heard somewhere that PT does not work with raid drives. Is this true?

Can anyone please comment and / or suggest an alternative.

I am planning on getting the new iMac i7 with Magma T3 and the 1 x HDX plus 8-8-8 system - I would welcome any comments about that too....please.

Thanks

Never heard that PT won't run on RAID drives. How would it even know?

My Startup volume which I run PT 10 HD Native has been a 3 disc software raid 0 for years. (Mac Pro 1st gen)

Steve

[John_Toolbox]

Originally Posted by Chris King

Hi


I am just working on my order for my new PT10(11)HDX system.

I am having trouble finding out what external thunderbolt drive I should buy.
I like the look of the Lacie 5big Thunderbolt (5 bay raid)
http://www.lacie.com/uk/products/product.htm?id=10607
I heard somewhere that PT does not work with raid drives. Is this true?

Can anyone please comment and / or suggest an alternative.

I am planning on getting the new iMac i7 with Magma T3 and the 1 x HDX plus 8-8-8 system - I would welcome any comments about that too....please.

Thanks

Do you truely need a 5 bay RAID for your setup? If you're not already running PT10HD with the disk cache feature, I would definitely test a large session first using that, you're probably going to be fine. The whole point of the disk cache is to eliminate the need for expensive drive arrays like this. I think your money might be better spent on an SSD to make the mac boot/load apps fast, and maxing out the RAM.

I think if you need the space available 5 drives, it's just for storage, so there's no need to get an expensive RAID enclosure.

[stevedemena]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

Do you truely need a 5 bay RAID for your setup? If you're not already running PT10HD with the disk cache feature, I would definitely test a large session first using that, you're probably going to be fine. The whole point of the disk cache is to eliminate the need for expensive drive arrays like this. I think your money might be better spent on an SSD to make the mac boot/load apps fast, and maxing out the RAM.

I think if you need the space available 5 drives, it's just for storage, so there's no need to get an expensive RAID enclosure.

What exactly can be loaded in a PT 11 disk cache?

Just clips from the projects? If so than the RAID array could also contain one's large library of sample libraries, as well as house the very large project libraries many of us have, with multiple iterations of all our clients projects. I know for me I get projects that need to be de-hummed (duplicating all clips) than the clients wants to hear it in different tempi and pitch (Serato pitch and time) and before you know it the project folder is quite large.

I'd enjoy a large LaCie RAID.

[John_Toolbox]

Basically all of the audio on the timeline in your session. So if you have 32GB of ram, and your session has 20GB of audio in the timeline, all of that audio gets played back from RAM, so the speed of your disk is not really relevant during playback.

Sample libraries and VIs will vary in behavior by their own design, or how you set them up. Most newer libraries use a combination of disk streaming and RAM. If you stream samples from disk, then a fast disk makes sense, but read speed is really all that's relevant for samples, so SSDs make a lot of sense for samples since they typically have very fast read speeds, and their write speeds are about 1/3(still fast when you consider the speeds some SSDs read at).

I personally think the RAID will be overkill, but it shouldn't hurt anything.

[stevedemena]

Originally Posted by John_Toolbox

Basically all of the audio on the timeline in your session. So if you have 32GB of ram, and your session has 20GB of audio in the timeline, all of that audio gets played back from RAM, so the speed of your disk is not really relevant during playback.

John, thanks for the RAM cache timeline information. On my first gen Mac Pro I have 13GB RAM and devote 3-4 GB for the cache. I get all of my projects (typically under 20 audio tracks) cached.