Do I need a fast system drive if i also have a RAID 0 array for media?

If my video and media files are all on a Fast RAID array then do i need a fast system drive?
Im building a system. The only thing on my system drive will be programs. And I will have a RAID array for my video and PSD files - but my System drive is an older UltraDMA EIDE133 250g Maxtor. This system drive is testing at 51mb/s Read, and 26mb/s write. (According to Blackmagic disk speed check program)
A New SATA drive tests at 53 write and 43 read. So should i bother upgrading my system drive to a RAPTOR 150 or stick with the older EIDE drive? Main Programs i use are Adobe After effects, premiere pro, Photoshop for uncompressed editing with blackmagic intensity.
Specs:
MB: Tyan K8WE
AMD Opteron 270 (dual)
4GB RAM.
Nvidia Quadro FX 560
Apple cinema Display 30'
4x500gb RAID array (2TB total) on Nvidia SATA motherboard controler.

Jeron,
Yes, you are probably.
- Its i either spend $900 dollars or $200.
The best possible Rig is this; I spend $500 dollars on a dedicated PCI-X RAID controller card. I buy a Raptor 150g system drive $200. And then buying another 3 drives to add to the RAID array of 2 disks i already have = $300.
Or option 2: My motherboard (K8WE) has 4 SATA-II ports. So I could set up a 4 disk raid with what i have right now and be achieving 210+ mb/s read and write. My system drive would be off the IDE/133 channel. Then i would only have to spend $200 on 2 disks.
I have been trying to decipher if it is logical to spend that much more money - when it is possible i will only achieve maybe 50 more Megabytes a second. - and have windows and programs start faster.
A part of me says - "any time i try to save money on something it comes with calamity and disaster". vs. a part of me that says - "you could get more bang for your buck".

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sorry, why isn't correct?
i try convert video with quick time to apple tv, import in itunes( that's ok) but is impossible to synchronize my apple tv ( unsupported file).
where I wrong?
please could you explain me the correct procedure?
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apple world is new for me, after 25 years with microsoft!
thank so much
mauro

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Working photographer needs help with hard drives and raid O decisions

Hi new here and also new to Mac well almost new been 20 years since i had a mac. i have a Mac Pro Book and this led to ordering the MacPro since I am a working photographer i made a complete switch in platforms so i have some questions and such but I did place a order on Friday for a 2.66 4gbs of Ram , 2 500 gb hard drive and a 30 in monitor and of course the ATI 1900 XT card so yes i am waiting like many for that card.
I put initial 4gb of ram since running CS2 will at least take a max of 3gb's in the memory cache . i plan on getting 2gbs more from OWC since that seems to be the only 3rd party ram at the moment that is working correctly from reading some of the threads here. Having 6gbs is a no brainer really given the amount of Raw processing that i do along with PS work plus having e-mail and other apps open at the same time. The ram to me is the easy part although expensive . My biggest issue is what to do with the 2 hard drive slots and Raid O or not but I will start a thread on that. But i will have 6gbs total for now and the bottom line is you can never have enough ram still holds true.
Now on to my diliemma with hard drives. I did have a raid O scsi 10k rapture and and 10 k scratch on my Dell box and I am just not sure what to do here. i ordered the 2 500 gb hard drive and I may just put them on the storage side of things than get 2 WD 150gb 10 k Sata drives. Now i could Raid O them for 300 gb and get a performace boast that way or i could keep them seperate and put everything on 1 150 drive and ue the second for scratch only. What i don't know is what Mac perfers and what works better. Not worried so much about failure of drives, thats just life in the big city stuff and you just have backups. What i more worried about is performance versus a waste . seems to me that Raid O may not even be needed with these new Intel boxes with all the horsepower going on. Now the other think I notice is the WD 150gb 10 k drives are 1.5 and not 3.0 so is it really faster than the 7200 3.0 single hard drives. I read barefeats shoot out and it seems just getting the right drives in 7200 and Raid O them maybe the answer.
Okay i am not the biggest geek on the planet but I do know my stuff but this is a area that i look for more knowledge on this. So if i can get some sound advice in this area. i know there are many photographers out there like me pushing hundreds of images that could use the same advice. Now let's leave the money end out , folks sometimes think more with there wallet than what works best not that I am opposed to saving money but after spending over 7 k already on this system it becomes a moot point. LOL
www.guymancusophoto.com

Ok your question is if you should RAID O the two 150GB Raptors or not.
I think it was wise for you to get a couple of them for a boot drive with "Time Machine" coming in the next version of Mac OS X. The second drive would make a excellent bootable backup and eliminating downtime if a boot drive dies on you one morning.
In fact any boot drive cloning software that is Mac Intel ready now would do you good.
Now Barefeats has run some tests, and I can pretty much back up what they say from my own experience.
Mac OS X and apps can be helped only so much by a faster boot drive, and a single 10,000 RPM Raptor is enough, RAID O a pair is overkill.
If you install everything on the boot Raptor and keep your space hogging files (except iTunes) in new folders on another drive, even a 7,200 RPM 500GB, the two drives combined is faster as there is nearly no wait. Both drives can be accessed at the same time. Keeping the boot drive slim keeps the stylus (arm) moving as little as possible to get all the small reads/writes Mac OS X needs.
I RAID O-ed my boot drives because 74GB was the largest they had at the time, so combining them gave me speed and larger storage. I hardly use the speed, it only comes in handy if by rare chance I duplicate a 20GB folder, then I can do it in half the time of a 7,200 RPM drive.
Some of the drawbacks of a RAID O set, especially as a boot drive is that I have to auto-clone the whole set to a external drive regularly (I actually do a couple). Since the data path is separated with a RAID O, any drive failure results in total data loss.
So if you RAID O those 150GB Raptors, your going to have to clone 300GB to a external drive (or another internal) regularly, like once a week. This will take considerable time and you can't use the machine while the cloning process is going on. Sure auto-cloning software like DeJaVu can be used at night/weekends, but why bother cloning more than you have to for no big speed increase?
However if your messing with huge Photoshop files that spill over your CS2 3GB RAM limit (you need to have a "scratch" thats as fast as RAM), duplicating large files and other heavy duty drive work, then a boot RAID O will come in handy. Just remember your initial performance of 185 MB p/s will drop about 20-25% when those drives are 3/4 filled. Still 140 MB p/s is extremely good and a no worry situation.
What is worrysome is anything below 80MB p/s (I'm talking uncached 4K write speeds under X-Bench) with a new boot drive and then as time elaspes that boot drive gets filled up and loses half or more of it's inital speed. 30 MB p/s is really slow. Beachball H&LL.
http://www.barefeats.com/hard33b.html
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Hi,
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You need a backup, preferably more than one. This is an example of why.
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Isolating an issue by using another user account
If the problem is still there, try booting into the Safe Mode using your normal account. Disconnect all peripherals except those needed for the test. Shut down the computer and then power it back up after waiting 10 seconds. Immediately after hearing the startup chime, hold down the shift key and continue to hold it until the gray Apple icon and a progress bar appear. The boot up is significantly slower than normal. This will reset some caches, forces a directory check, and disables all startup and login items, among other things. When you reboot normally, the initial reboot may be slower than normal. If the system operates normally, there may be 3rd party applications which are causing a problem. Try deleting/disabling the third party applications after a restart by using the application un-installer. For each disable/delete, you will need to restart if you don't do them all at once.
Safe Mode
Safe Mode - Mavericks

I have partitioned my time capsule, but I can't get it to work as a Time Machine back up and permanent media server for both mac and PC. What format do I need to partition the drive to so that it works for both mac and windows and so that it will be visab

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Thanks

You are mixing up a couple of things here.
The TC drive cannot be partitioned without removing it.. did you do that?
If you partition it you must use a Mac disk utility and use the HFS+ ie standard Mac format. And GUID partition table not windows type.
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There is no media server in the TC.. it is merely disk storage.. you can serve files from it to a media device.. but the TC itself is dumb as dumb.
Now the actual format of the drive is irrelevant to the PC.. The TC offers SMB file services to the network. You can copy files to and from the TC as if it was a local disk without caring one iota about the format. The TC handles that .. it is not a local disk .. it is a network drive.
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You can create a disk image via the disk utility in a Mac.. and as stated you can create partitions if you do it on a Mac with the disk directly connected which means breaking warranty if any exists on the TC.

Problem when booting from PATA drive on IDE-3 with SATA RAID on ICH5R

Hello,
I have a PATA drive installed as Master on IDE-3 (Promise Controller), using Windows XP as the operating system. I also have an aditional drive as Slave on IDE-3.
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I set the On-Chip IDE Configuration as follows:
Native Mode
SATA Only
Keep PATA Active - Yes
PATA Channel selection - Both
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The PATA IDE channel associated with the Promise controller is exclusively designed to be used as a RAID solution. It seems you have an invalid hardware installation of your 2 EIDE drives. Although you succesfully installed WinXP using that configuration, you're destined to have unpredictable behavior because of it.
WinXP looks to the BIOS first to identify hard drives. Then it does something that no other OS has done before (except maybe Win2K), it attempts to detect the hard drive directly through the wires itself. If it finds something, it installs resources to get it to work right. In your case, WinXP has bypassed the BIOS and detected the drives but doesn't really know where they are. WinXP just knows they are there so it supplied the necessary resources to complete the installation.
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Both hd's are splitted into two and each server their purpose, so I have no intention of running two identical systems.

Hi Danielsan,
RAID only comes faster when you set 2 identical HDD as an array for RAID 0. If you're using 2 different HDDs, the different performance for each HDD may impact the performance of the RAID 0 to even worse than a single drive performance.
If you have critical data and want instant backup, RAID 1 serves you well where the data is 100% mirrored on the 2nd HDD. This RAID 1 does not provide any performance edge as RAID 0 though.
You can also use the IDE3 and IDE4 for single drive operation with some workaround.
Some would suggest to use modded BIOS (which void the warranty) to flash Ultra ATA133 controller to the BIOS and lose RAID function, then you can use both IDE3 and IDE4 for single drive and even optical drives.
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The big question I have is this: is it your intention to work on the same documents on both the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro? If so, I strongly suggest that you pick one program and use it on both. Pages and Word are both good word processors but they really are not compatible - rather Pages can read Word files and be forced to create Word files. But the reading and writing isn't perfect and sometimes the amount of work required to re-edit a translated file is substantial.
Installing Office on the MacBook Air isn't going to slow it down unless your hard drive is already very full and Word should run okay on it (though you might not be able to run Word at the same time as you run other programs).

Cannot see new Seagate 1TB Hard Drive on SBS 2008 R2 (Onboard RAID)

This is probably an easy setup, but I just want to make sure that I am doing this correctly and not mess up the current Raid Array.
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I can set the new Hard Drive status from READY to Onlin A01-00. When I save and exit, then look at the physical disk status again, it reads as ready.
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After some looking around, I found a Document about the RAID Controller on the motherboard. Instead of adding the new Physical Drive as a Virtual Drive in the RAID Bios screen, I found that I was able to download an Intel Console version that was more user
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Lets look at these possibilities:
1.     2 sata drives in raid 0 (for media, including audio/music and animations/motion graphics)
2.     2 sata drives in raid 0, and a 3rd drive for audio and motion graphics.
3.     2 sata drives for media (no raid), a 3rd for audio and motion graphics

The idea is to duplicate the footage to both drives and import both as separate bins into premiere and on the timeline go back and forth between the two drive to not stress a single drive. Is this a good possibility or better to put them into raid 0.
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To reinstall the original OSX in your rMBP, boot the MBP using the COMMAND-OPTION-R keys. The display should show a picture if the planet earth and you will be connected to the Apple servers. Make certain that you have a solid Internet connection and follow the instructions.
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Ciao.

Do I need a fast system drive if i also have a RAID 0 array for media?

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