My storage solution

I am a beginning editor and am working on smaller projects, the storage solution I just came up with should work well for anyone in a similar situation.

I have a 27" i7 iMac with the 2GB video card and 16 GB of RAM I bought from OWC. I've spent the past 3 months trying to figure out the best storage solution and came up with something pretty awesome. The main thing I don't like is how Thunderbolt is so expensive and drive speed isn't really there yet, so it can be a waste. So after a lot of research I came up with this solution.

I will be replacing my internal Apple 1TB HDD with the 3TB Seagate Barracuda 6GB/s drive. The iMac can handle 6GB/s but the drives it ships with are all 3GB/s so it's a waste. I will use this drive for storing all my active FCPX projects and events.

I am adding the 120GB OWC Mercury Pro Extreme, it's an amazingly fast drive with very high incompressible read and write speed which I believe is supposed to really help with video editing.

WIth those two drives setup internally I will be able to have plenty of storage for my medium sized projects and I'll be able to utilize the max speeds of everything without having to waste money on Thunderbolt.

Additionally, I ordered a second 3TB hard drive to use with a firewire800 docking station. This way I can leave the drive plugged in for a time machine backup. But I can also use this station to plug in other hard drives so I can archive my projects and events when I'm done editing. I believe this is the fastest most cost effective setup for someone doing small to medium sized projects. I doubt 3TB will be enough storage for something working on a large project or documentary, but anything less than that should work fine.

Here is a link to an OWC cart if any of you want to check out these items.

OWC Cart

Yeah sounds cool and might be perfect for small project that you will be working on.
But on a higher level of project I will still advice using a external drive so you have the option to move from workstation to workstation. Not forgetting to backup or move project and raw material when the machine goes down.

But give us your experience when you get your config up and running.

Dude, who told you Thunderbolt drive "speed" isn't there yet? I've edited with them. They blaze! The "speed" is PLENTY there!

But what you have will be a great system for limited projects as Scrubs says. Just be aware that HD video eats up storage space. 120GB isn't a tone of storage space, but it should last you a good while.

Let us know how it works out. Sounds like a nice system.

Well Thunderbolt can go as fast as 10Gb/s, but drive speeds aren't there yet. 6Gb/s is pretty much the max I've seen. I'm installing hard drives into my computer that run at 6Gb/s, having an external Thunderbolt drive would just cost more money.

The solid state drive is only for my operating system and programs so I won't need more than 120GB. The media will all be stored on the 3TB internal HDD.

If I need to move from workstation to work station, I can use the HDD dock for that. And since all of my media will be stored on 3.5" internal drives, whenever a Thunderbolt docking station is sold, I can just upgrade the dock connection while keeping my media on the same drives.

When I'm done with a project, I can just offload it through the dock to an archive HDD.

I'll be installing it sometime next week after the shipment arrives, I'll let you know what the difference is compared to my stock setup now.

OK, you're really not understanding Thunderbolt. Put a SATA or SSD RAID on it and you're actually getting much greater speed than a single drive. That's the whole point of a RAID. eSATA is the fastest external protocol we had so far. It was very limited by it's bandwidth. The drives could actually pipe data through faster than the protocol could handle.

Thunderbolt opens that up so that a SATA or SSD RAID can function at full speed, with plenty of bandwidth to spare for monitors, I/O devices, etc.

I've actually edited with a Pegasus and again with a LaCie T'bolt RAID. I can assure you nothing you've ever used comes close to the data throughput speed of a Thunderbolt RAID.

So if you really believe that T'bolt drive systems are not any faster than SATA, you're really misinformed.

Yeah, your right. The RAID setup is really fast, it's just not something that even enters my mind right now because it's so expensive that there is no point in thinking about it. 4TB is around $1200. Once I start making money editing that will be an option, but at this point it's like owning a BMW M5 when a regular BMW will be just fine.

You may want to think about that. 6TB for $700. But seriously, yeah, they are pricey because of the expensive components needed. Prices are starting to inch down. And when PC's get T'bolt you'll see prices drop even more.

store.apple.com/us/search?find=thunderbolt+drive

Consider a Mac Pro, I'd spend end up spending $500 on four 2TB SATA internal drives. It's a close race there. Point it, prices are already dropping.

i just purchased an SSD from OWC and spoke to a consultant there.. he said I wouldn't see any speed differences from the extreme 6g vs. pro 6g drives for my system. they only help if your editing from them- you could save a little dough there...