Mac Pro and disk configuration for DV

Question

I have a MacPro with a 2 500gb and a 250gb internal disks. OSX is installed on one of the 500gb drives, I have the other 500 for data, like finalcut content, and the 250 for bootcamp (windows xp). I also have a 500gb WD mybook premium that I use for time machine.
I would like to add some more space dedicated to video.
I was thinking about was a WD mybook studio pro II 1TB using a stripe set. Here is where it gets messy in my opinion. Should I use FW800, or should I use eSata?
My next problem: I have 1TB of space on a nice fast raid0, but no redundancy. What should I do now? I can get another 1TB mybook (fw400) and do nightly backups, but with what? I would like to use time machine, but from what I read, you can only use 1 disk with it. I could use the software that comes on the mybook to do the backup, looks like it would work, but not all that pretty.
What I was thinking, get a 1TB fw drive and use it for time machine and back up the 500gb OS drive, and the 500gb data drive. I could get another 1tb drive and backup the mybook studio pro II nightly. That way I will never loose more than 1 days work.
The other thing I was thinking was use 2 mybook studio pro 2's and do a software raid1 and mirror them. So i would basicly have a raid 0+1 (mirrored stripeset). the stripes would be hardware raid, and the mirror would be software. From what I hear, software raid doesnt perform that well. Also, what interfaces would I use. I only have 1 fw800 port on the back, and would rather not plug 1 in the back, and 1 in the front. and it would be bad to use 1 fw800 and 1 fw400.
just trying to get the best balance between performace, reliability, and cost.
Any help would be great!
Thanks!
Brian

Answer 1

I would go easy on WD MyBook. Why the fondness for vendor? check out threads and reports on hard drives like MacIntouch.
http://www.macintouch.com/readerreports/harddrives/topic3970.html#d20aug2008
Put to rest the idea of mirroring. One drive today can saturate FW800. Mirrors are not as useful as backup and its built-in? Another: Apple dropped 0+1 for good reason in Leopard. But you heard software RAID...? Apple RAID is fine, done right.
Invest in a single 4-channel PCIe SATA controller and then you can use SATA drives, and do more than all these other FW drives, cables, all of which run on the single FW bus. Load your 500GB drives there and replace with newer drives (OS X, scratch, data).
If/when you need faster or better drives:
http://www.barefeats.com/harper14.html
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western%20Digital/WD6400AAKS/
TB drives: http://www.barefeats.com/hard94.html
Add WinClone and/or Windows backup software to backup to one of your existing FW drives, may as well use them for something.
TimeMachine will by default backup all drives. I don't like that. You can have multiple TM sets, nothing to stop you. Definitely don't rely on one backup set or strategy. Definitely use SuperDuper to keep working backups of your system too. You can backup to sparse disk images.
You have PCI Express to add disk controllers, you don't need to rely on USB or Firewire. And if you want to add FW/USB, less trouble and better Mac support with Oxford based OWC Mercury cases.
http://www.macsales.com/firewire/