Raid 0 storage drives Premiere Pro

ssamps

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Feb 28, 2012
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Need some advice on recommended brands and models of the best choice of hard drives for a raid 0 for Premiere Pro. A friend suggested the Western Digital Black drives...they look a bit pricey. Any other picks? Thanks.
 
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Maybe...

Another Thanks

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Thats what I use and yes a bit pricey. Only thing I can recommend is not using the WD green versions and anything over 750GB for your OS drive. May not be the case now but like last year problems were reported with drives having higher capacity had problems with large file. I might be wrong in some point somewhere but pretty close on target. The green drives tend to have problems indeed. Large capacity drives do just fine though for storage.
 

RealBeast

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First, I don't suggest putting your OS on your Premiere data array -- use a separate drive, preferably an SSD.

I use an 6 disk x 3Tb Hitachi 7200 rpm Deskstar RAID 5 array for my Premier working files, and then store them to an 8 (same disks) RAID 6 array. I like the Hitachi Deskstars, but the WD Blacks are also very good -- I just needed 3 Tb drives.

Do NOT use WD (or any other brand) Green drives in any RAID arrays, the head parking is not tolerated well in RAID. And I would only suggest RAID 0 if you don't need any fault tolerance. You may be better off if funds are limited in getting a good 3Tb working drive and also get a backup drive for finished projects -- no RAID of any kind is a substitute for backups.
 

Another Thanks

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Maybe you could also recommend a "scratch disc" arrangment for us low budget premier users. I currently keep the archive & capture files on a 2cd partition of the C drive even. And preview and audio files etc. on separate SATA drives. Only have so many drives to work with. Works for me but I've never been too bright.
 
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ratsa

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Have you seen this discussion on adobe forum? It is the grandaddy of all Premiere Pro disk discussion, and has been pretty heated for a couple of years:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/662972?start=0&tstart=0


What it boils down to is this: get FOUR 7200 rpm disks and set them up as follows:

C: OS, Programs
D: PageFile and Premiere Pro Media Cache
E: Previews and Exports
F: Media and Projects

C: can also be SSD, but that will not really speed up PP per se. If you do that, you might also put the PageFile on C:.

IMHO, you should not use RAID of any type unless you meet all three of these conditions:

(1) you are editing uncompressed video (only a few pros really do this), or multiple complicated compressed streams (which is pretty advanced);
(2) you have a lot of funds;
(3) you have a lot of time to dedicate, or a tech support person; and
(4) you've already maxed out your processor (i.e. hex-core), RAM (16 GB and up) and PP-supported GPU.

If you want RAID, you should keep your OS, program files and page file away from the RAID (unless you've got a 6+ disk RAID, which you really really should not do unless you meet the above conditions).

Don't forget that you still have to back up a RAID, regardless of whether it's 0, 1, 5, 10 or anything else. RAID 0 is downright dangerous.

Hope this helps.

EDIT: fyi, I have the three-disk version suggested in that adobe forum thread, and it works great. I will upgrade to 4 disks in the future.
 

RealBeast

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I use a second SSD as a scratch disk, but it would be fine to put it on partition of the HDD. And whatever you do, if you have 8-16gb of ram and an OS SSD, turn off hibernate and put your paging file on a secondary HDD as it is rarely accessed.
 

Another Thanks

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So then it has been good to consider not only the best drives and what you can afford but also the arrangement of where everything goes. I'll certainly use the info from the adobe forum above, it's not quite how I had things. Have 8gb of ram but didn't know about having the paging file on a different HDD. Will have too look into that. Thanks this has all been a real help for me hope it has been for you ssamps!
 

ssamps

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Feb 28, 2012
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The Hitachi Deskstars, I'll give them a look. And I will have a seperate SSD drive for OS and Programs. Also, since it is recommended on the Adobe website for a Raid 0, I will implement that configuration with a backup drive for project files. It was mentioned on this forum that the Raid 0 is almost X times faster that a single drive, with that in mind I don't know why anyone would consider a single drive set up or no Raid array. Thanks for all the feedback!