raid boxes whats good?

[Randall Chesbro]

Can you tell me if theres a big differece between external raid enclosures.
Iv seen some for around $350 andmaybe $80 for the satta controller. and whatever for HDs il have to look around for those. Is there something I should be looking for. raid 0 I know thats fine for video. if i have enough HDs id like to do i think raid 5?? will that give me the speed i need and a mirror partion?? Ill use this on a mac pro for mac stuff and SE on the XP side if it will see it...
thanks randyc

[ScorpioProd]

Some things to be careful of:

Not all hard drives will work well in a RAID. Western Digital specifically warns that unless you get their drives made for this, your RAID can drop out when a drive does normal error control housekeeping.

RAID 5 is a striped set with distributed parity, not mirroring.

As for external, you're talking about via an e-sata connection? If so, what format are you planning to use on the external RAID so that both Windows and Mac can see it and store big enough files for video? I believe some programs for the Mac will let you read/write to RAIDs formatted NTFS, but I'm not sure which of the NTFS support programs that is offhand.

[Randall Chesbro]

I will use e sata. I need to have someone tell me what i need to do. Im useing the plug in driver called Mac drive so I can see the Mac drives on the XP side. just doesnt work if its striped un less its a hardware raid. I think thats what the software said.
If you have any ideas what I should do please tell me.
Im useing SE and then on Mac side FCP dvdpro motion. It would be nice to see the raid on both sides
thanks

[donx]

You can upgrade Mac Drive to read OSX created Raid .
http://www.mediafour.com/products/crossstripe/

How do you like Mac Drive? I'm in progress of setting up Raid 1 with a Bootcamp MacPro set-up, I have no way to get files from the Mac side. Have you had any problems with Mac Drive. I will try the demo now.
So far I can't get my external dual drive bay to create a Raid 1, don't know the answer yet but will report back.

[Randall Chesbro]

I have 3 drives useing macdrive7 I havnt had any problems at all . Ill have to check that upgrade. maybe i wont need an external raid if it works.
thanks, randyc

[Randall Chesbro]

I just looked at the up grade. its $230. just for the software. yeowza. putting that $ into a box might be better.

[donx]

The upgrade is really US$100
I just got my external 2 bay enclosure to work as a hardware raid. Set to Raid 1 for redundancy. I got a $30 eSATA PCIe card that didn't mention OSX compatability but it works with no problem in my MACpro. It also has 2 eSATA outputs and will also work as a hardware RAID.
I installed two WD Caviar Black drives in the external enclosure and, as Ray pointed out they are not the best for RAID 0 but seem to work for RAID 1 with no user problems.
So now I will just start using this system to see if there are any problems.
Thanks for the tip on MAC Drive, the demo works well, now I can read and write to all my drives.

[dbakerstl]

If you are using SATAII drives from WD make sure they are enterprise class, otherwise you may have raid problems..

Also I would not use raid5 for video editing, use raid 10. get 4 1TB drives in a raid 10 array and you will have 2TB usable, with fault tollerence, and great throughput. Raid5 is going to take write hits due to parity checks, and if a drive fails you will not be able to edit video until its replaced and the array is rebuilt. But with raid10 there is only a small performance impact on a drive failure, and you could continue a project while waiting for a replacement.

-Dan