To RAID or not to RAID: 4Tb Mac Pro Server

Hi,
Hope someone can steer in the right direction.
I've got a Mac Pro Server. It has 4 x 1Tb HDs and a 6TB Drobo S for backup. It has a RAID card.
My query is, as I need at least 2Tb space instantly to store Final Cut Pro files, etc. Won't be using the server to actually edit anything, or any other tasks.
a) Do I set up RAID and get only approx. 2TB of usable space - therefore filling it up straightaway
b) Leave it as 4 separate 1Tb harddrives (to get most space)and let the Drobo do its BeyondRAID thing? (At the moment the data is all a Mac and on single Firewire external drives).
c) If I go RAID (it's brand new so I'm at the setup stage). Which is the best option for me?
d) If I do RAID, should I partition 100gb on drive 1, for OSX and programs, etc and then RAID the rest? I guess that means I have to reinstall the whole system? Or can I 'live' partition on a Mac these days?
The Mac Server is a fairly temp solution as we're getting a proper SANs this year, but at present the data lives on a Mac tower (with MyStudio backup drive) and also on a few Firewire drives.
HELP!
Many thanks.

1. With only 4 drives, raid 5 should be fine. That gives 3TB (1TB for redundancy).
2. A backup is more important than raid.
3. The raid setup for the san can be tricky. Depending on the size, you may not want raid 5, but 50, or 6. Consider: A 16TB raid 5 array will need to read all bits CORRECTLY to rebuild a failed raid 5 array. What is the bit error rate of modern disks? Approximately 1 bit for 16TB-20TB of data. So a large raid 5 san may fail to rebuild. Got a backup? This is why they created raid 6.
4. I would setup an extra partition, maybe 100GB, on the raid array. Why? I find it handy, if you need to check the disks, you can reboot from that 100GB partition and check the big partition. Also, you can have 2 different versions of the os on the raid array. You will find this useful, when a update comes out that breaks some things, you can run off the older os and you don't have to live with the broken functionality.

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To RAID or not to RAID: 4Tb Mac Pro Server

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