RAID 5 inside my macpro

First of all, you need a raid card to get Raid 5. Given the price of a proper one (Areca, Atto) using it with only three drives is a bit of a waste. It'll also give you 6G speed with 6G drives.
You can do it, it will work, but its a bit of a waste to be honest. You may want to look at such a raid card and an external enclosure. Even if you only fill it with three drives, you will have empty slots left that you can fill with new drives as your storage need increases so you're ok for the future.
As far as drives are concerned - I know Areca have a list of drives approved for their cards on their site. I usually use Hitachi. They are a bit on the warm side but very fast, approved for 24/7 and I never had any issues with them.

Hi -
you do not need to do any more research. All your research is right in front of you.
I apologize for being condecending, but literally blinking in your face in these banner ads
are all the wonderful manufacturers that make the correct drive arrays for your editing system.
And not only are these companies advertising right here, blinking at you saying LOOK AT ME - but
every one of these companies has forums on Creative Cow, where you can ask detailed questions
about these products.

The advice you have just been given is 100% correct - you do not need a RAID 5 card for three internal drives. If you do not want to buy one of the wonderful products that you see advertised here on Creative Cow, then just get three internal SATA drives, create a RAID 0, and be done with it.

Bob Zelin

Michael,

If you end up going external, think about what I/O you'd want to use, what kind of speed you'd need (Codec depending), what software you'll be using, etc. With all that information in mind we'll (Bob, myself & whomever else) be able to steer you in the right direction. We are here to help, that's what we're here for.

Jonathan Schilling
Vertical Sales Manager
ProAvio
12221 Florence Ave.
Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
Dir: 562-777-3498
Main: 562-777-3488 X106
Fax: 562-777-3499
Email: jon@proavio.com

Mike,

In an external (I'm guessing since you mentioned 4 drives) 4 bay chassis you'll be faster in RAID 0 than with RAID 5 (if you have the option of either or) & you're already understanding that you'll lose a little bit more than 1 drive's capacity running in RAID 5, as 1 drive is used for parity in the event that 1 of your 4 drives fails.

There are options out there that will allow you to populate a chassis with 4 drives and connect via Fire Wire 800, or eSATA or USB 2.0 that offer RAID 5 on-board & in fact we sell a unit like that: EB400FR or, you could go with a mini-SAS connected JBOD chassis like ours: EB400MS and populate with your own drives & buy an Areca 1223X card which will give you hardware RAID outside the box but at a higher cost and the use of a PCIe slot on your Mac Pro..where as the cheaper Fire Wire 800 RAID 5 box wouldn't need an additional card to run it.

Ultimately you'll be weighing price and speed against price & I/O and speed.

So, there's 2 options for you in the realm of external drive storage offerings.

Of course the more drives you have, the faster you'll go also...our eight bay mini-SAS EB800-MS with the Areca 1223X card will give you 900-1000MB/s in RAID 5 while with the 4 bay you'll be running at about 1/2 that speed.

We're all here to help if you need more suggestions.

Jonathan Schilling
Vertical Sales Manager
Proavio
12221 Florence Ave.
Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670
Dir: 562-777-3498
Main: 562-777-3488 X106
Fax: 562-777-3499
Email: jon@proavio.com