Hard Drive / Raid?

[bpking]

Hi All,

I'm in the process of getting a laptop for working on Maya mainly.  I am only interested in working with animated shorts.  I am definately going for a SSD drive.  Here are some of the concerns I have and need help with:

1- Is 256 GB enough or should I get a 500 GB SSD drive?

2- Do I need two drives, or with money being an issue would it work if I just have one SSD drive and I have a portable drive to save files in?

3- Would I need to raid my system, is it essential for what I am doing because I am reading from forums that some of you do that.  

4- is a Quadro K1100M 2GB GDDR5 card better then a GeForce GTX 870M GPU with 6 GB GDDR5? Or for that matter is a 2GB Quadro card sufficient?

Thanks

Bobby

[dgorsman]

There are several RAID configurations, some for redundancy (normally used on servers) and some for speed (normally used on desktops).  None of them really apply to laptops, neither is it a necessity for working with Maya.  Thats just adding complexity and using battery life for no real purpose.  If the portability isn't essential ie. priority number one, consider a desktop and use the savings to pick up a decent tablet.

An external hard drive (a cloud drive may even be appropriate) should be acceptable for carting around work.  I'd mirror the content onto the hard drive for working purposes, and push it back when done.  No point creating data bottlenecks if you don't have to, and no point keeping files on the hard drive that aren't in frequent use.  Size the hard drive accordingly.

[bpking]

Hi Dgorsman thanks for the tips!  Now what about the video cards on the laptop.  

I have read that the Quadro card is the professional card so is a 2GB Quadro card sufficient?  And is 256 GB SSD drive enough for working on lets say two small projects at a time on it, and the rest I'll just copy it to my external. Thanks.