To RAID or not to RAID in Mac Pro 2009

[derhamm]

I'm using a Mac Pro 2009 2.66Ghz 8 core with two 400GB OCZ enterprise grade SSDs in bays 1 and 2, and two WD Caviar Black 2TB drives in bays 3 and 4, plus a 4TB Hitachi Deskstar drive in one of the optical bays. I'm doing work with Final Cut Pro X and Pro Tools 9 (which I need to find out if ProTools works with RAID well). How would you RAID or not RAID these five drives if you had this set up? Initially I was going to RAID 0 the two SSDs as boot drive (800GB) to give me 500MB/sec reads and writes (Mac Pro 2009 has SATA II), RAID 0 the two HDDs for media storage (4TB) (not sure what speed benefit I'll get there with SATA II and HDDs in RAID 0), and then use the 4TB HDD as backup for all of my data (with Super Duper on a nightly schedule)

But maybe I should go without RAID and use one SSD as boot drive, one SSD as current Pro Tools session data drive, and the two HDDs as media storage either RAID 0 or separate partitions. Thoughts?

Mac Pro 8 core 2.66GHz (2009)
24GB RAM
ATI 5870 Graphics
(2) OCZ Deneva 400GB SSD's
(2) WD Caviar Black 2TB HDD's
(1) Hitachi Deskstar 4TB HDD
Pro Tools 9.03

[peterle]

...so far i know..
(software-)raid is not supported with protools
maybe its different with a raid-controller (hardware)

regards

[OddsAre]

Software RAID is definitely not supported. If it were me, I would purchase two- 2 Bay external RAID enclosures. Put the 2 OCZ's in one and the 2 WD's in the other. If your goal is to get increased bandwidth for higher track counts, better video streaming, etc. then set them to RAID 0. If you are looking for redundant backup, set them to RAID 1 and the two drives will show up as one and the second drive will mirror the first.

Just remember that external RAID enclosures are like most things in life, cheap ones are cheap... so do your homework.

Then I would use the Deskstar purely as a backup drive for currently active projects.

My 2 cents.