Life Zero has a fantastic step-by-step article up that walks you through building your own super-fast RAID enclosure for editing and post-production. The final product delivers 4TB of storage, can be upgraded to 8TB if you buy larger drives, and best of all it delivers faster performance than the $5,660 CalDigit HDPro. At up to 400MB/s+ write and 500MB/s+ read in RAID 0, this unit is very quick. In RAID 5 mode, the speed drops to around 300 MB/s write and 400 MB/s read. The final cost for the system with today’s prices is a paltry $1414.51. Here’s the shopping list:

* DV Warehouse Edit Box 8ML (x1) $550.00
* Infiniband Cable from Amazon (x2) $71.26
* RocketRaid 2322 (x1) $274.85
* 500GB Western Digital WD5000AAKS (x8) $518.40

The Amazon items above would ship with the Free Super Saver option, and expect to pay $25-$50 to ship the RAID enclosure to your doorstep. So all told, you are still looking at well under $1500 invested in a RAID that beats the pants off one of the leaders in this arena. Very cool indeed.

For extra geek points, at a theoretical expense in total performance, you can try 750GB or 1TB drive configurations, yielding 6TB and 8TB, respectively. It’s nice that this RAID array offers the upgrade overhead should you need to add more space.

You can read the entire article here, it briefly discusses assembly and configuration of the system and screencaps of the AJA speed tests are there as well if you don’t believe the numbers.