In computer animation not affiliated with a studio, is a R.A.I.D. system absolutely necessary?
Question:
Answers:
Well, RAID systems are good for a few things and all have their stengths in the particular configuration.
1. Redundentcy: if you want to have a relaiable hardware system to avoid data loss through hard-drive failure, use a RAID 1, 5, 1+0 (mirrored then striped) or 0+1 (striped then mirrored)
2. READ / WRITE: when you stirpe a hard-drive (make two or more hard-drives join together as one) you actually double the read/write speed.. so a 15K rpm drive becomes 30k with a second hard-drive of equal speed. Use RAID 0 for read/write spped.
3. MASS STORAGE: prety much any raid other then 1 (mirrored drives) will give you more storage room..
So now ask yourself the following questions;
Though you are not affiliated with a studio, do you need the read/write speed for fast render farms? Do you need expendable storage? Do you need a large storage space for your work?
I would say that if you don't have a very high-volume render farm, a RAID 5 can be an all-round robust and flexible solution for you. You will gain read/write speed with the proper RAID card, and get the best storage and redundancy for the buck!
Good luck!
- Eyal.
Raid is just for fault tolerence, it's one or more disks that work in unison, writing the same data to each disk. It's just like having a constant backup, if one drive fails, there's still one or more with the exact same data on it. It's not absolutely necessary, but it certainly is nice to never have to worry about your hdd crashing and losing all your work.
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