Advice on Storage under $800
StarMarc Jan 10, 2012 1:27 PMHappy New Year everyone. While I am new to this forum, I've been using Premiere for over a decade (Premiere 5.0), back then people (AVID editors then Final Cut) used to laugh at me lol.
ANYWAY, like a lot of discussion starters here, i'm planning on building a new system SOON. During the past few days of researching, this forum has singlehandedly changed my original setup most noteably going from the Quadro 5000 to the GTX 580 and am heavily considering using a RAID setup. So special thanks to everyone here for your time in educating us all! Despite the fact that ive been a Premiere user for years, I have never consulted this forum... which in hindsight, has been a tremendous mistake.
Case in point is my current system that i built 2.5 years ago, an i7 920, 12Gb ram..quadro 3800 and (dont laugh, but if you do, im used to it, see above) 3 1TB 7200 drives SATA drives. 1 for programs/OS and the other 2 drives contain ALL my projects, music, stock footage etc. I edit ALOT of 5D footage and AE and have been quite successful with the system under tight deadlines even winning a Canon contest (everytime Im under these time constraints I always get nervous the system won't hold up, sorta like Han Solo with the Millenium Falcon).
So after that long winded setup, to all the great minds here I am asking for your advice. Currently I have about $3000 budgeted for a new system, while I researched a ton in the past few weeks much of my knowledge came from books and sites that were geared more for general purpose computing and/or gaming. This forum is different, and so I am hoping to get some great advice here.
After all the other hardware and software (win 7, production cs5) costs, I have about $800-$1000 I can dedicate to storage. Any advice which way I can go, I know anything would be better than what I have now. I originally thought I could buy a 120Gb SSD for my OS/programs, a 256Gb SSD for my current projects and a 2TB for backup, etc. But of course, this forum has taught me better. Especialy the fact that SSD's aren't optimal for editing HD files AND RAID's are the way to go.
The storage system will have to be expandable because I have already placed a deposit on the Epic-X, so i know I would tons of storage for those 4k files.
Also, I know I may be advised to get a RAID setup, however I have never done this before. Can I use any decent drive?? i.e. Seagate Baraccudas or WD caviar blues??? or do I need to go for drives that are geared for RAIDs. Are there any good online resources for setting up RAIDS??
MANY, MANY, MANY THANKS in advance for your time and patience with my (for lack of a better term) case.




