Re: Storage and raid quesion for ideal AE 1080p workflow.

The G5 only has two spare drive bays, so "filling them up" won't be too tough. The only way to meet your space needs (2-3TB) is to use the largest drives you can get these days, 1TB. As a result, you can have a maximum of 2TB space which falls at the low end of your space needs.

As for working with 1920x1080 uncompressed 8-bit HD, the datarate for a single layer of this footage is 120MBps (that's megabytes). Two drives striped together in RAID 0 might get you 80MBps on a good day, but that speed will drop quickly as the drives fill up with footage. This 2-drive setup falls far short of your speed requirements, and that's only for one layer. If you expect to have several layers of HD footage in Final Cut Pro, the requirements go up.

This setup WILL "handle" uncompressed HD footage in FCP, but it will be slow and certainly won't play back full quality in real-time. This is why people buy those expensive RAID boxes you mentioned. On that note, OSX only does RAID 0 and 1, you can't do RAID 5 without a controller card which starts at around $400. RAID 5 also requires a minimum of three drives, which is out of your capacity range without a separate drive enclosure. I should add that RAID 0 is highly risky unless you plan to do daily backups of your project and source materials, which will require you to have another 1-2TB worth of external drives handy.

With After Effects, the hard drive speed plays a smaller role since so much of your work in AE involves RAM previews, not real-time disk previews. If you plan to do 1920x1080 uncompressed HD work in AE, it's RAM that you will need, and a lot of it (think 6-8GB).

Brendan Coots

Splitvision Digital

www.splitvisiondigital.com