PT, you are not a typical user or a typical situation. You are closing in on situations that I see corporate users facing. I made that statement to cover the other 99%'ers. I do see your point on using a RAID 1, RAID 5 is a newer standard of RAID 0 (from what I can gather) and it allows to still be able to read if one drive fails, but requires at least three drives. Still seems like you loose something, but I didn't investigate much more to be honest.
My system uses 4 drives, both internal for the editing computer and for the two LAN NASes.
In the pre-video game days, both computer manufacturers and Microsoft made the mistake of assuming that home systems should be simpler and less powerful than business systems. Exactly the opposite is true. The typical business user does word-processing, spreadsheets, reads PDFs and sends lots of email. That doesn't require a powerful machine, though, of course, it does mandate data security. The typical home user, on the other hand, is editing photos (which continue to increase in megapixels), watching videos and listening to music, editing video and music, and doing far more tasks that are CPU and GPU intensive.
Our data security needs are also significant. For example, I have decades of photographs stored on my LAN -- I shoot digital now, but I also have a high-quality negative scanner and, over the past 5 years ago, have made a significant dent in my film. I would be devastated if I lost those -- they're irreplaceable.
When home computing was still new, I had acquired one of the very early IBM PC-XTs, a major step up from the Commodore 64 that I had been using before it. The XT came with a 20 megabyte drive (that's not a typo
). I thought that was all the data storage I'd ever need, and happily dumped everything onto it, without much concern for backup. I had one of the first "standardized" MIDI interfaces, a Roland MPU-401 (anyone remember those?) and, if I recall correctly, was working with Cakewalk, the Fostex A8LR (I had worked my way up from an early Tascam 4-track cassette-based Portastudio), and a box that synced the Fostex to the computer. Well, one night I was defragging the hard drive, a process which took 24 hours (!!!) and something went wrong -- the hard drive crashed, all the data was lost and the script and all the Cakewalk MIDI files for a musical (the same one I'm working on now) were lost. THAT was when I realized the importance of data redundancy, and immediately bought a tape backup for the hard drive. I've been using some form of heavy-duty backup ever since and, happily, haven't lost a byte of data. That musical set dormant for nearly 20 years, until I acquired an m-Audio Fast Track Ultra and was able to digitize all the tapes from the Fostex (which, amazingly, still worked after sitting on the shelf for so long) and, with modern DAWs, was able to manipulate the recorded audio and add new material with little difficulty. One of the interesting problems was that the reel-to-reel tapes, which were not stored properly, had stretched just enough to pull the audio noticeably off pitch, so every track had to be corrected. Also, the limitations of only 8 analog tracks, one of which was dedicated to the sync track, meant that I had to bounce a lot of tracks to get full orchestrations; I've spent considerable time playing with filters and the like to separate out (more or less) the individual instrument parts. And, of course, both the limitations of the Fostex and cramming 8 tracks onto 1/4" tape meant processing each and every track to remove hiss, as well as added noise from using the crappy mikes that I had at the time.
I do my composition on a music computer, also a quad core, but save the data over the LAN to the NASes. It does slow things a little bit, but it's not much of an issue with MIDI. I also render out to the NAS, rather than the local music computer when I'm ready to mix. Mixing is done on my belts-and-suspenders editing computer, which I also use for other tasks.
Mirroring the editing computer isn't feasible -- though I have a gigabit LAN, I do a lot of photo, video and music editing, and moving that much data to the NASes on a mirrored basis would just bog down the computer. I have a service computer (an HP thin client -- very useful little beasts, and I have a bunch of them) that handles back-up chores on a nightly basis when I'm (usually) not working on the editing computer. Just for safety's sake, it also sends a subset of the backup data (though, unfortunately, not media data) via VPN to another thin client with a 3 terabyte USB drive that's at my office. I also have another USB 3.0 3-terabyte drive that I use to mirror the NASes and, once a month or so, I'll take it to the office and sync the non-nightly back up files to the off-site server I have in my office.
This system, though probably overkill, has served me well and I've already had several instances in which, for one reason or another, critical data went missing -- restoring it from one of the many redundant back-up options I have was a piece of cake.
The RAID 5 system in my editing computer runs of a dedicated card, rather than the MB's SATA connections. Accordingly, there is no additional overhead on the CPU. I do it this way because, should my MB ever get fried, I can simply plug the card into a replacement computer with no data loss whatsoever.
The OS and programs are on the SSD and not backed up. It's easy enough to reinstall the OS if necessary, and I have to do it every year or so anyway as Windows becomes unstable over time. My only concern with the OS and programs is speed -- boot fast, load fast and let me get to work.
Though I'm probably not a typical user, I think my computing and data backup needs are pretty typical -- though most people don't have a system like mine, they probably should think about acquiring something with similar functionality. We all live digital lives now, and data security should be paramount.
My understanding of the RAID 5 standard is your gain is on read, you take a hit on write, maybe not an issue for you. You are working with a lot of data, so your complete situation is going to be difficult and an easy workflow difficult. I can see your point on the mirroring (RAID 1), you might be adding more burden to the system using the RAID 5 without any real benefits. (As stated, and you may want to look further, the performance improvement comes in smaller data read/writes, audio are large data chunks).
If you kept the OS not mirrored, did a snapshot image of its configuration and stored it (I have to assume this is pretty stable), then used your working drives and mirrored those only, with some sort of backups (I am not sure that would be required), that would give yo a pretty decent system without over burdening your system.[/QUOTE]
