Apple Final Cut Server 1.5 - Manual (Page 15)

Chapter 2 About Building a Final Cut Server System 15
About RAIDs and SANs
Although Final Cut Server can use a wide variety of local and network volumes as
devices for storing and working with your media, a couple of storage solutions work
particularly well with Final Cut Server.
A Redundant Array of Independent Disks (RAID) can have some advantages:
Increased performance: Â One of the primary limiting factors in transferring large media
files is the hard disk’s input/output speed. By splitting the data among several hard
disks, you can reduce the impact of this limitation.
Increased reliability:
 Hard disks have the potential to fail at any time. RAIDs can be
configured to supply protection against a hard disk failure, making it possible to
recover the media lost when a hard disk fails.
Having a fast reliable RAID connected directly to the Final Cut Server computer allows
that computer to take advantage of the RAID’s performance. This does not benefit the
Final Cut Server clients, however, which must still get the video data over an Ethernet
cable. This is where a SAN can help.
A storage area network (SAN) allows multiple computers to connect to a storage device
as if it was a locally connected device. This allows you to use the media on the storage
device (typically a RAID) exactly as if it was on a local hard disk.
Final Cut Server includes the ability to configure a storage device that is part of a SAN
as an edit-in-place device. Clients that are directly connected to edit-in-place devices
have the advantage of direct access to the device’s media—the clients do not need to
cache a local copy of an asset before being able to use it in a Final Cut Pro project. This
can be a huge advantage when working with large video files.