Please help me arrange my hard drive setup, testing out different Raid arrays.

Question

Hi folks! If I could bother you for your time to help me figure out what the best options are for my computer setup that would be much appreciated!! I'm editing mostly RED footage so 5K and 4K files.
Here's what my computer build is right now:
Asus Rampage IV Extreme
i7-3930K CPU (OC'd to 4.4ghz)
64GB ram
GTX 680 video card (2GB model)
Windows 7 Pro
Mostly Premiere CS6 and After Effects
Here's the fun part and the part that I'm still baffled by regardless of how many videos and searches I've done online, what to do with my hard drives!?
Right now I have my Mobo setup in Raid mode with these plugged in to the motherboard;
2 x 250gb Samsung pro SSD's on 6gb/s ports (Raid 0) (Windows 7 OS)
2 x 300gb WD Velociraptors 3gb/s ports (Raid 0) (empty)
3 Ware 9750-8i Raid controller +
8 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda drives ready to rock and roll.
Now based on everything I've read, I'm leaning towards setting up 4 x 3TB drives in Raid0 for my footage (making constant backups with synctoy onto an external Drobo)
4 x 3TB drives in Raid0 for exporting footage. (with continuous backups)
That leaves me wondering where's the best place to setup Media cache, cache files and project files and anything else. Also I've left the OS pagefile on the SSD's but wondering if I should set that up somewhere else?
Using Crystal Disk mark, I'm getting these results so far:
OS on Samsung Pro SSD's in Raid0
The 4 x 3TB drives in various Raid setups:
Raid0
Raid5
Raid10
Velociraptors in Raid0
All this is due to many months of recent work on a computer build that would get bogged down and editing became painfully slow. I'm trying out a proper dedicated Raid card instead of just 2 drives in Raid0 off the motherboard hoping this will make a big difference.
Any expert advice on here would be greatly appreciated!!!!

Answer 1

Let's start with the easy part:
C: SSD for OS, programs & pagefile
D: 2 x Veliciraptor in raid0 for media cache and previews
With 8 disks available on the 3Ware controller you can go many different directions and they depend on your workflow. Let me give two extreme examples and then you may be pointed in the right correction for your editing practice.
Workflow consists of quick and dirty editing, usually one day or less and multiple export formats each day (example Vimeo, YouTube, BDR, DVD and web), or
Workflow consists of extensive editing, usually a week or longer and exports to a few formats at the end of the editing (example BDR and DVD only).
If your typical workflow looks like 1, your idea of two 4x raid0 arrays can work, because the load is rather nicely distributed over the two arrays. Of course the drawback is that there is no redundancy so you depend very much on the backups to your Drobo and restoring data after data loss can be time consuming, coming from the Drobo.
If your workflow looks more like 2, then you can consider one 7x raid5 array for projects and media and a single drive for exports. That means that your raid5 will be noticeably faster then either of the 4x raid0 arrays you considered and offer redundancy as well. As a rough rule of thumb, a 4x disk raid0 will be almost 4 times faster than a single disk, a 7x raid5 will be around 5 - 5.5 times faster than a single disk. You profit from the extra speed during the whole editing week or longer.
The export to a single disk may be somewhat slower, but how long does it take to write say 25 GB to a single disk? Around 160 seconds. If you use a hot swappable drive cage, you can even use multiple export disks, say one for Client A, another one for Client B, etc. In your initial idea of a 4x raid0 that time may be 40 seconds, so you gain around 2 minutes on the export, but lose that in the whole editing week.
Just my $ 0.02