I/O speeds and Hard drive systems for video production

Kernos

Kernos

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I have a 2.7 ghz Dual G5 Mac Pro, I primarily use for video. It takes many hours to encode a 2 hour video to a DMG. It seems the bottleneck is more drive I/O than cpu, as neither of the latter are maxed when encoding.

The internal drives are SATA I. I have 2, I TB drives I could start up as soft striped raid via FW800. Would a FW800 striped RAID be faster than an internal SATA I.

I really do not want to buy more hardware. I suspect an eSata card and enclosure for the 1TB drives would be cheapest and fastest.

Is this thinking correct?

TIA,

Bill
 
Usually software RAIDs provide little-to-no speed benefit over single drives, since the CPU must now take over not only the reads and writes from the disks, but the management and calculations of the RAID as well.

eSATA would definitely be fast, although a hardware striped RAID solution would be even faster.
 
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