RAID setup for PP/AE?

I think RAID 0 is probably not the best answer to speeding boot and loading times in 2011.

Solid State Drives [ SSD's] use memory chips rather than moving disks .

The OCZ vertex 3 series drives , or OCZ revodrive 2 will run many times faster than a RAID array .

Capacity is limited [ by cost] so most people use them as boot drives and storage for current projects , and add a back up hard drive or two for data storage .

many of the folks here are convinced raid 3 is the only option as its slightly faster for editing, but you can pick whichever raid fits your needs best. if you just want max performance with no data/drive protection you could do raid-0, but raid 5 wouldn't be a good option for data/drive protection with that many drives. instead, raid 6 is a good option as it should be able to loose two drives and recover. the extra parity in raid 6 should be more robust with any bit rot (file corruption). raid 30/50 can loose two drives, but not two in the same raid 3/5 subset and the parity isn't shared across all 8 drives. raid 10 is even more robust, but would loose half the total capacity.

if the data that will be placed on the 8-bay Areca 8050T2 is important or critical, it should be backed up to another copy/location as well. a nas, single external drives, the internet/cloud etc. when buying lots of drives at the same time, they are mfg'd at the same time and multiple can fail at the same time. so its not unheard of to have a raid built to handle 1-2 drive failures go completely down when 2-3+ fail at the same time, or more fail when the raid is trying to rebuild/recover from the first lost drive(s).

Question, if you don't mind:

Isn't RAID 5 a "less parity-ed" version of RAID 6? Would it not be faster because you are writing 1/2 parity blocks than RAID 6?

RAID 3, or 30 and RAID 6 or 60 are great for sequential files like video.  Never use RAID 0 because it has no redundancy and do not use RAID 5 as it is slow on sequential files, really for high usage short files.

You might want to read what my dear departed forum friend Harm used in the past before extreme speed SSD's were available