RAID Drives In Digital Video and Audio Production
Posted on Thu, May 06, 2010 @ 04:45 PM
What is a RAID Drive and why use it for digital video and audio production? RAID is an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Independent) Discs.
A RAID is a series of hard drives that when added together act as a single storage system. In most configurations this storage system can tolerate the loss of a disc drive without losing data and depending on how it is configured can rebuild itself once the failed drive is replaced.
RAID drive systems can be configured several ways. Different configurations are referred to as levels. RAID Level 0, 1 and 5 are the most common. RAID drive systems can also be configured as Level 3, 10 and 50. This article addresses only the 3 most common.
A Raid level defines the way the data is spread across the drives.
Raid Level O (striping)
This raid level provides no redundancy across the drives. Performance is improved but failure of any disc results in complete data loss. This level maximizes the amount of data storage available because there is no redundancy.
Raid Level O Usage: Any application which requires high speed storage, but does not require redundancy, such as Photoshop temporary files. Some video editors prefer Level 0 for the main editing drive because of fast data transfer rate. Fully redundant configurations tend to cause digital video editing systems to operate slow or crash.
Raid Level 1 (Mirroring)
This Raid duplicates all data from one drive to a second drive so if either drive fails no data is lost.
Raid Level 1 Usage: Applications which require redundancy with fast random writes or systems where only two drives are available.
Raid Level 5 (Distributed Parity)
Raid level 5 distributes data across several drives and distributes parity among all drives. If one drive fails all data can be rebuilt, if more than one drive fails all data will be lost.
Raid Level 5 Usage: Provides higher performance if most input/output is random and in small chunks, an office database server is a good example.
When editing audio and video projects it is always a good idea to store files you want to keep for more than a few days/weeks/months on a RAID Level 1 or 5. The redundancy feature of these configurations can be very valuable. While the cost of a RAID drive system may seem high, it may be cheap insurance compared to the cost of losing a completed or almost completed project.