Managing RAID on Linux

Case 4: The Acme Motion Picture Company

People who produce motion pictures are faced with many storage problems. Accommodating giant source files, providing instant access to unedited footage, and storing a finished product that could easily exceed hundreds of gigabytes are just a few of the major storage issues that the film and television industries face.

Film production workstations would benefit greatly from RAID-5. While RAID-0 might seem like a good choice because of its fast performance, losing a work-in-progress might set work back by days, or even weeks. By using RAID-5, editors are able to achieve redundancy and see an improvement in performance. Likewise, RAID-1 might seem like a good choice because it offers redundancy without much of a performance hit during disk failures. But RAID-1, as discussed earlier, leads to an increase only in read performance, and editors will likely be writing postproduced clips often until the desired cut is achieved.

Source files and finished scenes would benefit most from RAID-1 setups. Workstations could read source files from these RAID-1 servers. Parallel reads would allow editors and production assistants to quickly pull in source video that could then be edited locally on the RAID-5 array, where write performance is better than on RAID-1. When a particular scene is completed, it could then be sent back to the RAID-1 array for safekeeping. Although write performance on RAID-1 isn’t as fast as on RAID-5, the redundancy of RAID-1 is essential ...