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RAID 0 and editing High Def files

J

jnmfox

Member
I recently purchased an opteron 165, which is figgin sweet btw, and am selling my 3000+. I was considering using the proceeds to purchase a new hard drive. I was considering getting another 250 GB Hitachi T7K250 or maybe a 74 GB raptor.

I have a myHD 130 that I use to record HD programs like Lost and football games (before the season ended 🙁), I then edit them with HDTV2MPEG. Also, using Virtualdubmod I edit the .avi files I recorded from the analog tuner. The file sizes range from 3 GB to over 100GB.

Looking just at performance and skipping over the whole ?you double your chances of losing your data?. Would I see a benefit from using RAID 0? Should I use them as two separate drives? Or go for the raptor?

Thanks for your feedback
 
RAID0 would be better than a single fast drive when moving or editing extremely large files. But you'd have to balance that against copying from one drive to another, since you'll thrash if you have a RAID0 and you copy between two folders or partitions on the same array (or you are recording while working on a file at the same time).
 
So would I be better off not RAIDing the drives and instead recording onto one of the Hitachi drives then saving the edited file to the other Hitachi drive?
 
Originally posted by: jnmfox
So would I be better off not RAIDing the drives and instead recording onto one of the Hitachi drives then saving the edited file to the other Hitachi drive?
Click to expand...

That's the question. It's hard to say which would be faster overall; for a 'record, then edit' scenario, I would lean towards keeping the drives separate. Copying from one drive to another lets each run at close to its maximum STR, which is usually the limiting factor in non-recoding edits on large video files (if you are encoding/transcoding the files, the limitation by FAR will be the CPU). In theory, RAID0 doubles STR, but then you would lose some overhead due to thrashing between the input and output file.

However, if you will be editing one file while potentially recording another, a RAID0 might be better. A RAID0 array may handle multiple in-flight I/Os better than a single drive.
 
Considering I like to do several things at one time (record, edit, rip DVDs, etc) I think I am going to try RAID.
 
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