Apple Final Cut Server - Manual (Page 16)

16 Part I Installation and Configuration
Storage Device Strategy
Before you install Final Cut Server, you need to decide how you want to store your media.
About Devices
Final Cut Server uses the term devices to refer to media storage locations that you
configure Final Cut Server to use. Devices can be folders on the computer’s boot hard
disk, a second hard disk, a FireWire drive, or on a network-connected volume.
When you install Final Cut Server, several default devices are created. Once the installer
finishes, you can also configure other devices. These can include existing folders on
volumes that already contain media that you would like to include in the
Final Cut Server catalog. Using Device Setup Assistant, you can configure a scan
automation that will add a device’s existing media to the Final Cut Server catalog.
One thing to keep in mind is that using separate hard disks for some devices can be
more efficient. For example, when you upload assets to the catalog, a variety of proxy
files are created and placed in the Proxies device that the installer created. Having the
Proxies device on a different physical hard disk than the device the asset is stored on
(not just on a different partition on the same hard disk) can make the proxy
transcoding process more efficient—one hard disk can focus on reading the asset and
the other can focus on writing the proxy (as opposed to the same hard disk jumping
back and forth between reading and writing).
About RAIDs and SANs
While 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: 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, but that does not benefit
the Final Cut Server clients, which must still get the video data over an Ethernet cable.
This is where a SAN can help.