SCRATCH drive space requirement for R3D editing

[Will Keir]

Hey guys, about to configure my RAID 0 with two partitions, 1) for apps etc... 2) scratch drive for FCP.

How big should my scratch drive be?

I have 1.2GB total available space, so I could go 600gb/600gb or 400gb/800gb, what is working out there, what is too much, what is too little for the scratch and apps. Currently I think 500GB is about right for apps on the main partition. Thanks for any guidance/advice.

Thanks

 

[Will Keir]

anyone?

 

[Will Keir]

man, I was hoping to avoid going to Creative COW.

 

[Frederick Giles]

Scratch size depends alot on how big your R3D projects are going to be, for a feature you want to have 4TB and you should have a completely separate drive for system/apps.

 

[Will Keir]

wow 4tb!

 

[Grant H]

wow 4tb!

It's a couple of 2tb drives. Barely an expense in the grand scheme of things.

It is also a terrible idea to partition your scratch disk. It needs to be separate to everything else otherwise you're just increasing latency/read times. Rendering it somewhat useless.

 

[Tom.Wong]

have a single disk for just your boot drive and apps. whether it be a ssd or normal spinning disc.

raid should be it's own entity like grant said. when building a raid you have to worry about block sizes too. for big video, you tend to want a larger block size, but for apps and so on you need smaller. plus a raid 0 has a higher risk of failure. one drive does, it all goes. so you want to only use it for stuff you have backed up already.

always use the same brand and model of drives in the raid. don't mix and match you'll suffer massive performance hits. a raid will always default to the slowest drive in the array and force the other drives to match its speed. so you want everything with identical performance.

 

[Jim Geduldick]

As Tom mentioned buying drives in bulk if you can from the same manufacturer is something I do .
One gotcha with this to keep an eye on if you frequent some of the tech blogs and performance sites that report on bad drive lots you might also want to keep an eye on the raid if you have serial numbers that fall within those bad lots.
You can get very inexpensive raid chassis these days with Thunderbolt/Mini-SAS/eSATA that will be much faster then Firewire

 

[Jarek Zabczynski]

SSD for apps/boot, RAID5 for scratch, plus backup.

 

[Grant H]

SSD for apps/boot, RAID5 for scratch, plus backup.

Curious as to why you think RAID5 for Scratch? Nothing truly important exists on the Scratch other than temp and render previews. If anything performance is better suited there and an incremental/nightly backup taken from it.