Portable laptop raid question for small projects

Hi group, I edit on my mbp laptop on X and while I have an internal SSD I have external usb 3.0 drives usually 2tb. the Read Write speeds is pretty slow as you know 55-120mb/s for what I do I need a bit more speed so I bought a dual raid usb 3.0 solution and with 2tb samsung I have one 4tb RAID 0 and another that is mirrored @2tb each.

I am thinking of having the project, proxy, and cache on on the striped and keeping original media on the mirrored drive(s) wondering if anyone with knowledge can confirm this is good setup.

The striped is running about 200mb and as I said the mirrored at 55-120mb/s.

BTw my projects are typically short under 5 min. I shoot on Canon dslr and XF100 so my footage is not very large..

Thanks Dave

I think you're boiling down to the MBP's gnu rather than drive speed. But, if you optimize your DSLR footage, you should have great performance. If you're using native H.264 (I think that's that that camera records) then one RAID should be fine for everything. Again, I find on mine that issue of performance always end up bing GPU related, not drive speed related.

Thanks Ben, I thought my main problem was drive speed I hope this will help

I recently edited some event videos for a DJ friend on my Macbook Pro. I used Firewire 800 drives that he provided. I didn't have any problems since it was pretty much just 1-2 layers of video and the occasional title. I checked them out with Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and some of the drives had read/write speeds of about 60 MB/sec and the fastest was about 80. FWIW

Hi thanks for the answer, I've also been doing so, but I have seen some problems as well.

Glad it worked out for you!

dfphoto wrote: ...external usb 3.0 drives usually 2tb. the Read Write speeds is pretty slow as you know 55-120mb/s for what I do I need a bit more speed...

55-120 MB/sec is a pretty big range. I have seen external bus-powered USB 3 drives as slow as 35 MB/sec and as fast as 130 MB/sec. The easiest solution is just use the fast ones. 120 - 130 MB/sec is actually not bad for editing H.264 which limits I/O due to the compressed nature.

The fastest USB 3 drives I've tested are the 1TB HGST Touro Pro and Touro S: www.amazon.com/HGST-High-Performance-Por...rds=hgst+touro+s+1tb

The 4TB Seagate Backup Plus Fast is probably the fastest available bus-powered USB 3 spinning drive. Internally it is two-drive RAID0: www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-E...ate+backup+plus+fast

The 2TB Seagate Backup Plus Slim is typically pretty fast, although not quite equal to the HGST Touro S. I've also had some unexplained variations in performance with these drives: www.amazon.com/Seagate-Backup-Portable-E...ate+backup+plus+slim

Hi I think didn't represent my question correctly.

I now have a 4tb usb 3.0 Raid 0 (striped) it's showing 200mb/s via aja and blackmagic disk test.
I want to put the fcpx project and cache and proxy here.

I also have another 4tb raid 3.0 but that's a mirrored 2tb setup that's showing about 75-125mb/s
all have samsung/seagate 2tb drives internally. This has the project original files and the backups of fcpx are going to the laptop SSD.

I have many 1-3tb drives in 2.5 and 3.5" but lately for ease I'm using WD external 2tb usb 3.0 drives but I have esata, usb 3 and thunderbolt drive setups plus a Lacie Little big disk raid thunderbolt.

I'm asking if anyone has experience in setting up raids for video editing and what their experiences are with a setup such as mine