Quote Originally Posted by laboprod View Post
If you do not have a raid array, I do not think FireWire 800 will be faster than FireWire 400, because as Brook said, you will be limited by your computer's drive speed, nto the port. You can see that RED-DRIVE will be a raid array made from two disks...
I think a lot of people here already have some pretty fast editing systems and drive subsystems. RAID 0, 3, 5, etc.. arrays are pretty common these days. Not to mention that many newer 3.5" desktop HDDs are rather quick compared to 2.5" mobile HDDs. Even with the 2.5" units in a RAID-0 stripe. So many possible system configs, there's no way to tell for sure what people will be dealing with. But if a system takes in data slower than a RED DRIVE puts it out, then I don't know how a person would expect to edit with that system or the slow drives.

But either way... FW800 has a lot more head room than what the drives inside a RED DRIVE can kick out.

I am thinking to have a raid 1 array on the set to transfert the images from the RED-DRIVE, RED-RAM or RED-FLASH. It won't be faster to write, but it will be safer than a to a single disk.
What about RAID 0+1? Doubles the number of drives, but then you get the striped array for performance plus an identical striped array as a redundant mirror.

I think Brooke is about right with the time you need, therefore I recommend to have two disks, or 2 32GB SATA FLASH (if you do narativ work).
2 drives or a drive plus a well-equipped FLASH option is the way to go. The worst thing you can do is chance any down-time. Unless you're just dinking around by yourself. I ran into some downtime transfer issues when I was first settling into my P2 workflow. Makes for lots of grumpy people and in the case of the HVX lots of people who couldn't understand why there was a tape deck in the camera and I wouldn't use it.