Recommendation: disk drive configuration

I use my Mac Pro at work for some basic iMovie video editing, so I have very capacity requirements. I currently have multiple hard disks; my startup disk is a 500GB SATA in HDD bay 1. I have two 400GB SATA drives in HDD bays 2 & 3, RAIDed together with RAID 1. I then have an external 500 GB FireWire drive running as my Time Machine drive. I'm finding that my external drive is full, and Time Machine is no longer backing up; so now I'm revisiting the configuration I should have on this system.
My question is about the best configuration I can put on this system. I obviously have large capacity requirements (due to the movie editing) so I'm wondering if anyone has any "best practice" recommendations for configuring a Mac Pro's hard disks. I have the financial ability to expand this machine up to 4 750GB SATA drives (by replacing the existing ones), and I can probably track down a 1 TB external drive. The best configuration I can think of is the 4 750GB SATA drives, RAIDed together with something like RAID 0+1 (for a total of 1.5TB of space), and a 1TB external drive. Any one have any other tips?

I can't tell you how much storage space you need nor what the best RAID configuration might be, but I can suggest that your TM backup drive should be at least twice the capacity of the drive it's backing up. TM is an archival backup system which means each incremental backup saves all files that were modified since the previous backup along with all previous versions of those files. TM does not overwrite changed files. Hence your backup drive gets fuller with each hourly backup. You can reduce the demand somewhat by excluding stuff you may not need to continually backup such as system files that would be replaced by reinstalling OS X.
You should also plan for a method of backing up your data storage drives as well. A striped RAID provides no protection against a failed drive and no backup.

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    Check. SATA 6G port.
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    Just my $ 0.02

  • Comparison of SSD with hard disk drives

    Attribute or characteristic
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    Hard disk drive
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    The flying heads and rotating platters are generally susceptible to shock, altitude, and vibration
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    Click Kudos Thumbs Up on the right to say “Thanks” for helping!

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