When "One For the Price of Two" is Both Good and Desirable!

Irrespective of your era, it never generally makes good economic sense to get two of anything, only use one and call it valuable and worthwhile.. unless you're talking about a niche matter in computing. Okay, so the headline is a bit of a con really. One for the price of two isn't good value, but where this pays back is in redundancy. Yes my friends, we're talking about RAID.

What's RAID?

Depending upon who you ask, and for no discernible reason, RAID is an acronym - Redundant Array of Independent Disks or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. How there came to be two definitions is lost to the mists of time but I'm happy with either. For those who don't know anything of this it is a principle of sharing your data across two or more hard drives in order to either increase performance, provide more hard drive space or provide some level of protection against the scourge of reality - broken parts and wear and tear. In other words our nonsensical "value" is redundancy. This latter reason is why I've done this.

RAID is not.. I'll repeat that.. RAID IS NOT a get out of jail free card for those who choose not to perform data backups. It is not a substitute so don't be fooled.. keep doing those backups. If you value your data but don't do backups then shame on you, and people more cruel than I would say you deserve everything potentially coming to you.

There are different practical implementations of RAID, from RAID 0, 1, 5, 10.. We won't go into too much detail here but I've elected for RAID 1, which essentially means that I have two hard drives of equal capacity set up to function as a mirror or clone. Both drives contain exactly the same data, thus enabling a scenario whereby if one drive were to (re. will inevitably) suffer hardware failure no data is actually lost and I the user can continue happily, suffering only the anguish of knowing that the failed drive needs replacing ASAP as opposed to crying into his coffee over his lost data, particularly if he hasn't been doing backups. Once replaced the system will copy its data from the good drive to the new one and you're back to business as usual!

One caveat to my plan is that I'm running a 2Tb system but only have a 1Tb backup drive.. I trust you see the problem with this. To that end my next goal is to increase the size of the backup drive and that can only be done in this case by a new purchase.. alas no technological development that I know of allows you to simply nail or glue extra space onto a hard disk. This too however is a part of my near future rationale. It occurs to me that in times of fiscal strife the best way I could proceed is to replace my 1Tb external backup drive with a 4Tb drive - given that a 4Tb drive is "only" £20 or so more than a 2Tb drive makes justification quite simple.

Why 4Tb?

The least advisable and yet strangely popular RAID scheme is RAID 0, which combines your drives into one. In my case that would double the capacity of my drive space from 2Tb to 4Tb, but also compromise physical integrity in a very inadvisable direction. With RAID 0 your data is alternately written to both drives which means that you have your expected capacity increase and you gain an increase in read performance for your data. However since you're spreading your data over two drives you also double your chances of suffering mechanical failure since you now have two drives to worry about. Worse still if one goes t*ts up then you only have half of your data, and since that data is only every other bit then what remains intact is less use than a dolls head. This is why RAID 0 is pretty bad.. you don't get something for nothing. That said, if I was running out of space, absolutely needed the data space and had absolutely no chance of affording an upgrade for my hard drives then I could opt for a RAID 0 configuration to increase my working space to 4Tb and manage with regular backups to protect my data, until such time as I could afford to expand things.. hence a 4Tb external drive would cover me in this instance. Another route would be to use the 4Tb drive to store the excess work - at least that would only represent a single drive failure problem!?

Anyway at the end of the day it's all about protecting your data, assuming it matters to you. If it doesn't then forget everything I just described. As an aside, as I type the PC has already performed 21% of the task of synchronising the drive contents - yes it's doing it in the background as I write this.

Another advantage I experienced this morning going through the hassles of installing another hard drive is that it gave me another opportunity/excuse to indulge in cable management. I managed a slight but noticeable increase in quality.

Alas I have no before and after shots worthy for comparison so you'll have to take my word for it, but I think it looks quite tidy now - something to be revered in a system which relies on airflow to keep the volume of space within the chassis within a good operating temperature.

A Little More Room

Lately I've been putting myself through a gradual learning curve with DaVinci Resolve. I first encountered video editing using Shotcut, blissfully unaware that the world's leading colour grading company had released what is arguably the best free (with caveats) video editing workflow out there. No leaping in and out of Premiere Pro, between After Effects, Audition, etc.. for me. Here you have a complete, uninterrupted and active flow (meaning that you can work sequentially or jump from say tweaking the sound to extending a clip or importing something more - your project remains up to date and editable throughout) . Importing your work, cutting it, adding effects, colour grading (or course), sound mastering and exporting. In fact I dodged Adobe's bullet altogether, along with the increasingly loathsome subscription model. Between DaVinci, the Affinity suite and Artrage I'm doing quite well, if I say so myself. 

I said there was a caveat to the "free" status because not all the features are there to use.. Some are locked behind the paid version, and as you learn more you discover where those limitations lie. What is good is that there is nothing stopping you from using this package to achieve fabulous basic results and learn more than anyone's fair share of basic/intermediary level techniques and tricks. The price? £299 at time of writing.. Walking a line between products it's more expensive than the ridiculous value of Affinity but not as expensive as Adobe. Judging by its capability I'd say it's a fair price, and in context that's what it's all about. So far I'm loving it. It isn't without its capacity to fall over once in a while, but it certainly seems to be more stable than its competitor, if the anecdotal evidence from other users is to be believed.

What I did discover is that video editing is quite a hungry beast, and although where computer memory is concerned there is a real world law of diminishing returns on capacities above 16Gb I was tempted into buying myself a bit more space - enter two 16Gb sticks of Kingston Hyper X Fury RGB (RGB because reasons..). So Lain now has a bit more room to play and I have to say that 32Gb has quickly established itself as the new normal size for the playground. Affinity and Artrage have also benefitted from this. 

Homura Akemi and Madoka Kaname are optional, and aside from keeping the artist company have no technical impact upon the system performance whatsoever.