A recipe for happiness:

Jun 12, 2012 · Comments
AppleComputersRAIDYay!

Add:

• 2880×1800 resolution
• 2.6GHz Quad Core i7 Ivy Bridge
• 16GB 1600MHz RAM
• 512GB Solid State Storage

Garnish With:

• 4TB Promise Pegasus R4 RAID 5

What you get is the New MacBook Pro with Retina Display!

I just ordered this. It has been 3.5 years since I bought a new computer and it has been excruciating. I suspected, given all the rumors, that Apple was going to come out with something pretty cool at WWDC and they certainly did. This machine is definitely overkill for what I do, but using it will be a pleasure.

The 4TB RAID controller was not overkill and here’s why: Modern HD camcorders produce staggeringly huge video files. My mid 2008 MacBook Pro 15″ Core 2 Duo is not powerful enough to attempt editing video like this anywhere except the local drive. Which means that anytime I want to make a video of the kids I’m pulling the footage from the Synology NAS over the network which takes all night because it’s hundreds of gigabytes, or worse I’m pushing stuff onto the Synology so that there is space for me to load new footage onto my laptop from the camera.

You might wonder why I don’t just have an external drive to connect directly to the computer over something like FireWire 800. Well I do, but that drive, that I use as a scratch disk, is a 2TB RAID 0. This means that if one of the drives fails (which it will at some point) all of the data is gone and there is nothing that anyone can do about it.

This is not acceptable. So anything that goes on the FireWire800 drive, is duplicated somewhere else. That means making videos takes forever because the only places I can trust to store footage are my computer and my RAID 5 with hot spare NAS.

I could never save a project and walk away from it and come back later. The file copy times were prohibitively long and because I need the space on my laptop for other things when I am not video editing. No Longer.

Now I’ll have 2.7TB (this is what you are left with after setting the Pegasus up as RAID 5 and formatting it) of space to work with for movie editing. Currently I back up onto the NAS, but I’m toying with the idea of backing up to the Pegasus because it will be so much faster than doing it over the network. Yay!

Also, if I back up to the Pegasus, I’ll create another Volume that I only use for Time Machine. There is not good way to control how much space it uses, so you need to give it somewhere that it can roam free, but where it won’t each up space you need for your other files.

Also, thank god this came out before I finished up at Georgia Tech. That student discount really helped out a lot. Don’t get me wrong this was crazy expensive, but a couple of hundred bucks off helps.