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To RAID, or not to RAID

E

Earwax

Senior member
I recently purchased a new SATA 300GB Maxtor drive. I have a pair of 160GB IDE ATA drives that I am considering using in a RAID array (the one that doubles capacity, not the mirror.) I'm wondering if this is really worth doing, since I've been lurking around and seen that so many people have had failures.

I'm a digital video editor, and I feel that the speed would be a big plus. However, preventing drive crashes is equally important. I can live with the system as is, but the performance boost is tempting.

The other problem I'm having is, I'm trying to boot off of the SATA drive with a K8V deluxe, and install the IDE's onto the Promise raid array. However, I believe only the promise array allows the SATA to be treated as IDE drives, and for some reason, I cannot boot off of the SATA when it is hooked into the VIA SATA ports. Anyone know if there is a way around this?

Your opinions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
 
D'oh

I already set up a raid array with my two 160GB drives to boot off of. I'm too lazy to reformat again. I'll give it a try. Why wouldn't there be any performance boost? I've never set up a RAID before, but people have told me it doubles write speed...is this true?
 
Originally posted by: ssvegeta1010
Originally posted by: BW86
raid 5 is king 😉
Click to expand...

:thumbsup:
Click to expand...

Everyone's been talking about how good RAID 5 is. I was looking at the LSI MegaRAID 150-4 card, looks like it does hardware RAID. After looking at some benchmarks, the main thing that I can conclude is that write speeds don't really increase much (at least not notably) but read speeds seem to go up the more drives you have. I was just wondering if this reflects the real-world performance based on your setups.

And if you have any good advice for a noob to RAID, I would love to hear them.

Thanks!
 
If your video editing includes large file transfers, You should see a noticable improvement with a RAID0 array.

And personally I think the security issue has been blown out of proportion by the raid nazi's.
With the MTBF rates of newer "quality" hard drives in the hundreds of thousands of hours, hard drive crashes are not as common as they would have you think. And its to easy to back up your critical data to disc are a seperate hard drive, and you should be doing this anyway. Even if running only a single drive.
 
I'm planning on using my 300GB SATA drive as long term storage. All of my critical files will be stored there. Only current video projects I'm working on will have their raw data stored onto the RAID array, on a separate partition. Since the editing software I use references timecode on the tapes, I will be backing up my project files (which are essentially only a few kb, just pointers to the media) onto my backup drive.

In the worst case scenario, if the raid drives crash, I'll be able to redigitize all of my projects with the files saved onto the backup drive. So safety is not of paramount importance. I just don't want my drives to get permanently fried, and obviously I don't want them crasing every couple of weeks.

I'm gonna give it a shot I think, and see how it goes...
 
Originally posted by: CheesePoofs
Raid will give you no noticable performance improvement, so its probably better to not raid and keep your data safer.
Click to expand...

Ahhhh! what is up lately with all these 'cut & paste' cookie cutter, anti-RAID posts lately? Contrary to popular belief a RAID 0 array when used the way Earwax proposed regarding video editing, will, i repeat WILL give you noticable performance improvements!

Earwax, listen to me, are you listening? Take it from me, a fellow video editor who's been enjoying the performance benefits of a RAID 0 array with no loss of data for about a year and a half now. Go for it and don't worry about data loss, it's so blown out of proportion. It reminds me of people who buy expensive cars then keep them in their garage for fear of getting into an accident! Since your'e a video editor, you probably already have good backup habits so go for it.

Raid those two 160's together and use that nice new 300 gigger for backup.


🙂 🙂

 
Originally posted by: VTrider
Ahhhh! what is up lately with all these 'cut & paste' cookie cutter, anti-RAID posts lately?
Click to expand...

Don't you know? It's that stupid AT article, showing no improvement using Microsoft Excel etc. Well, f*cking DUH. "RAID Nazi" is a good name for these people that repeat each other's sayings without actually knowing anything about RAID.
 
I'm a video editor and I've had two drives stripped for 2 years now and it works well. It's not the end-all of performance, but it certainly feels like it has less drag on it when my software is reading source clips and rendering to the RAID at the same time.
 
Originally posted by: deveraux
Originally posted by: ssvegeta1010
Originally posted by: BW86
raid 5 is king 😉
Click to expand...

:thumbsup:
Click to expand...

Everyone's been talking about how good RAID 5 is. I was looking at the LSI MegaRAID 150-4 card, looks like it does hardware RAID. After looking at some benchmarks, the main thing that I can conclude is that write speeds don't really increase much (at least not notably) but read speeds seem to go up the more drives you have. I was just wondering if this reflects the real-world performance based on your setups.

And if you have any good advice for a noob to RAID, I would love to hear them.

Thanks!
Click to expand...

I'd start with the AT RAID FAQ, and the stuff at StorageReview.com. Plenty of info there.

RAID5 is about as fast as RAID1 when writing (at least a 2-disk RAID1), but almost as fast as RAID0 when reading. It gets faster at both as the number of drives in the RAID5 array increases; with eight drives, it's practically as good as an 8-way RAID0 while reading, but the STR while writing is still worse.
 
I was a little skeptical years ago also, same flack back then too. I decided to base my opinion on fact and I built my own RAID 0 array - glad I did. I tell everybody who's interested in RAID (when applicable) to go for it and don't worry at all about losing data. If you do, you should of had a back up system/habit in place - just like you would without RAID.
 
Originally posted by: GuitarDaddy
If your video editing includes large file transfers, You should see a noticable improvement with a RAID0 array.

And personally I think the security issue has been blown out of proportion by the raid nazi's.
With the MTBF rates of newer "quality" hard drives in the hundreds of thousands of hours, hard drive crashes are not as common as they would have you think. And its to easy to back up your critical data to disc are a seperate hard drive, and you should be doing this anyway. Even if running only a single drive.
Click to expand...

agreed there is nothing that you need to fear when it comes to raid 0. the key to any system failure is allways make backups of your files as for the programs as long as you have the disc for them you can always reinstall them, and rebuild the array


KxK
 
Originally posted by: VTrider
Originally posted by: CheesePoofs
Raid will give you no noticable performance improvement, so its probably better to not raid and keep your data safer.
Click to expand...

Ahhhh! what is up lately with all these 'cut & paste' cookie cutter, anti-RAID posts lately? Contrary to popular belief a RAID 0 array when used the way Earwax proposed regarding video editing, will, i repeat WILL give you noticable performance improvements!

Earwax, listen to me, are you listening? Take it from me, a fellow video editor who's been enjoying the performance benefits of a RAID 0 array with no loss of data for about a year and a half now. Go for it and don't worry about data loss, it's so blown out of proportion. It reminds me of people who buy expensive cars then keep them in their garage for fear of getting into an accident! Since your'e a video editor, you probably already have good backup habits so go for it.

Raid those two 160's together and use that nice new 300 gigger for backup.


🙂 🙂
Click to expand...

Agreed, most of the people claiming no performance increase wouldn't even know how to set up any RAID array.
 
In my main rig I had my pair of Raptors striped and one day the array broke. Neither drive was bad but the stripe was broken and when I recreated it the system blue screened on boot. This was using the onboard Intel controller on my Abit IC7-Max3 motherboard. I had to reload from scratch and I didn't use both drives this time around. In fact, I need to update my sig... 😉

My server has a RAID 0+1 array. I didn't need the extra speed, I just did it to play around. I'm probably going to back it up to my 300GB storage drive I got for my main rig and redo it using RAID5. That way I'll still have protection if a drive fails and I'll gain ~120GB of space. 🙂
 
VTrider, I love your attitude about Raid 0. I've got two 74G WD Raptors I want to put in an array. I'll use a 120G WD for backups. I hope to do some video editing. Can you give me advice from your experience on the best stripe size? How about partitioning size for the storage drive. Thanks!
 
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