It's a RAID

I’m still playing with the software tests, so here’s an exciting article on hard drives and hard drive maintenance. I spend a few hours each month taking care of the drives, and I believe it’s helped me avoid problems ranging from dropped frames to corrupted files.

Last week, my G5 was equipped with 575 gigabytes of hard drive turf. For an average computer owner, this is a lot of space, but video editing really eats up the bytes. I needed to add more hard drives, so I opted to buy a RAID, which adds an additional 1000 GB (or 1 TB, but I wanted to spell out the 3 zeroes—cheap geek thrills!) of capacity to my Mac.

I have a 1.6 MHz G5, which came with an 80 GB boot drive. Back in 2003, that was a pretty generous boot drive. I took the two 120-GB ATA drives that had been mounted internally in my G4 and put them into Firewire enclosures for 320 GB in total. OS X is not a space hog like that Windoze crap, so less than 4 GB of real estate is occupied by the operating system, leaving well over 300 GB in free space for apps, docs, and media files.

I used my G5 for everything: preproduction, post-production, grocery lists, money management stuff, and games. I kept the media files (clips, audio, graphics, rendering files, etc.) on the external drives, and I put everything else on the boot drive.

But my iTunes library kept growing as I ripped more of my CDs, so I added a 250 GB SATA drive in the empty bay and moved all the docs off the boot drive. I partitioned the SATA drive into an 80-GB partition (for backing up the boot drive) and the rest for docs.

I added Final Cut Studio 1 to the mix, plus a bunch of other apps, and I also added Internet access. The available space on all the drives began to shrink.

I added a couple of apps to help keep things clean by removing temp files, etc., which can clog up space. The first was a freeware program called MacJanitor which runs built-in Unix maintenance programs that normally run overnight, but with people like me who don’t keep computers on constantly, this program helps. I eventually replaced MacJanitor with a bigger app, Onyx, which does everything MacJanitor does plus a whole pile of things, especially cleaning up temp files. For safety, I bought Micromat’s excellent TechTool Pro, which has a suite of tests, diagnostics, and optimization tools.

I used a shareware program, Carbon Copy Cloner, to back up the boot drive about once a month. Since I set up a subscription with Mac.com, I use the Backup app included with the deal, I haven’t used the Cloner, but it’s a great tool.

The DV Shop recommended against defragmenting media drives—they recommended reformatting once the project is done. But with our projects still ongoing, I’ve had some of the clips on the external drives for a few years, so I periodically use Techtool to defrag the hard drives.

Every time I ran software updates, I’d lose more space. Eventually, I had just 9 GB free on the boot drive, which means I was using 89% of the drive. I’ve read in a few places that you shouldn’t exceed 80%, so it was time to change the boot drive. I hadn’t experienced any slowdowns with the nearly full drive, but I didn’t want to have anything go wrong during post-production on the DVD.

So… my first thought was to swap the 2 internal drives, using the larger partition (170 GB) on the 250 GB drive as the new boot drive and the original boot drive for media.

My external drives were filling up, too, with the DVD projects taking up space as we shot them, and I was keeping the olde stuff on there in case we needed it for the DVD as well. Out of the 250 GB or so of media drive real estate, I had about 60 GB left open. This is probably enough space to get through the DVD production next summer.

Then I saw an ad for Carbon Computing, who carries Elephant Storage disk drives and— boom!—another option appeared. With Serial ATA drives coming down in price, the Elephant 1 terabyte RAID (two 500 GB SATA drives in a case) was just $400 CAD. I couldn’t find 1 TB RAIDS as cheap anywhere else.

Weighing the two options, I decided to put the money down and expand the media drives and take care of my current and future hard drive problems with one device. I bought the RAID.

The RAID is not large at all—it’s not much bigger than the 2 cases the ATA drives are mounted in. It has a Firewire 800, a Firewire 400, and a USB 2, and it comes pre-formatted for OS X. The default configuration is as a striped RAID, the drives alternating, but can be reformatted to mirrored status. I opted to keep the striped RAID going—this was going to be my new media capture drive.

There is no instruction manual in the box, or on the drive itself, but there is a downloadable PDF at the Elephant website. The Elephant website is somewhat vague about the company’s particulars, so given that Carbon is the only retailer listed I think it’s probably part of the Carbon Computing company. I have no complaints about the product so far—everything’s assembled, you get USB, Firewire400 and Firewire800 cables, and the powerpack. The case is similar to the Mac tower’s metal case, and the front grill glows blue when it’s on.

Setup was painless. I plugged in the power supply, connected it to my Firewire800 port, and fired up the RAID. It appeared on the desktop without any problem. I turned on the other 2 external drives (one in a Firewire 400 case and the other connected via Firewire 800) and copied both to the RAID as the first test. I didn’t time them, but the Firewire 800 drive transferred files faster than the Firewire 400 did.

Next, I copied the contents of the two internal SATA drives to the RAID. I used Carbon Cloner to copy the boot drive, but I just dragged the other drive to the RAID and it copied. Overall, the internal drives copied much faster than I expected, but as expected the boot drive cloning was the slowest part of the process.

After I’d copied all the drives, I tested random files on the RAID to make sure everything opened and worked normally. I also ran Tech Tool to make sure the RAID was okay, and all the tests came back good.

One quirk, probably a bug from the depths of Firewire 800, is that I can only disconnect the drive to shut it down if the other Firewire 800 drive is also on and connected. Not a major problem, but I have to wait until the G5 shuts down before I can power off the RAID.

Next came the scary part. I deleted the contents of the partitioned drive and reformatted it as a single 250 GB drive. I considered using the install DVDs to create the new OS, but I opted to use Carbon Copy to duplicate the boot drive to preserve my settings. The boot disk now fills 71 gigabytes, so there’s plenty of space for more stuff!

I then went into the OS X Control Panel and picked the 250 GB drive as the startup disk. Then I rebooted while holding my breath, and when it restarted, everything worked fine. I spent quite a while making sure that all the apps worked, the external drives connected properly, and that all the docs opened properly. I ran Tech Tool’s tests a few times to make sure all the drives were working.

Once satisfied, I reformatted the 80 GB boot drive and copied the documents from the RAID over to it.

Next, I reformatted the two external drives to free them up. This wasn’t as stressful as all the contents worked fine on the RAID. I then set up Backup to backup the boot drive to the Firewire 400 drive.

The Firewire 800 drive is now my floater—extra space for post-production on my G5 and to move big files between my G5 and my iBook. I’ll probably backup the iPhoto and iTunes libraries as well.

The speed of the RAID is noticeable. I don’t have the software to time things out (nor do I really care to do so), but Norton whipped through an antivirus scan that would have taken hours, not minutes, on the external drives. And file transfers are faster. Clearly, the SATA interface and the striped drives are much quicker than a single ATA drive with an Oxford 911 enclosure.

Well, that’s all the excitement for this week. I hope to get one of my evaluations posted next week—honest!