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OT: Yet another RAID question
OTay: This is off-topic, but you guys know this stuff better than anyone else. I am starting an Internet Radio show, and cannot afford any downtime during the show, so I have to put C:\ in RAID 1. I still need to edit video, though, so what do I do for D:\?
I have a Dell T3400 with five drive bays, CoreDuo Quad at 3.0GHz, 8GB RAM, and an Intel X38 Express Chipset/ICH9R on the motherboard (software RAID). Anticipated video workflow would be multicam AVCHD converted to Cineform .avi with some light duty layering and FX.
Dell will happily sell me a PERC6/i RAID controller card and cables for about $300.00, which would give me true hardware RAID. Or, I can just create D:\ as three 1.5TB’s in RAID 0, and back up D:\ to my Drobo (via USB2); yet that would still leave C:\ in software RAID 1. How much performance hit is that? And what should I do? Thanks.
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
8 Replies
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take a look at these divices.
https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=11582
https://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=lGYmelQ8mJvPtYTv
The second link is if you don’t have a USB 3 port. -
[Norman Willis] “I can just create D:\ as three 1.5TB’s in RAID 0, and back up D:\ to my Drobo (via USB2); yet that would still leave C:\ in software RAID 1. How much performance hit is that? And what should I do?”
RAID 1 will give you fault tolerant reliability but will be slower than a single drive because of the redundant writes. Read performance should not be affected although I have read that it could be a bit slower. Writes to the swap file is your only concern. With lots of memory this should be minimal but you may want to place the swap file on a separate non-RAID drive.
RAID 0 makes no sense because it increases your chance of failure and there is no need for the increased speed. I would place the 3 x 1.5TB drives in a RAID 5 which will give you 3GB of reliable storage. If one drive fails you can rebuild the array from the other two.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
Danny, thanks. I did not realize it was so inexpensive to get PCI USB 3!
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
Ok, I bought the card. My hope is that if the card will handle the redundant writes then maybe I can get a few more years out of my CoreDuo Quad.
I’d love to have an i7 and an external USB3 backup, but there is no budget for it at the moment….
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
The Blackmagic cards are pretty specific on the express slot properties it needs to handle the Intensity pro card and the USB 3 card needed for the Shuttle, which I have. Make sure you read up on which slot to put it in on Blackmagics site and your motherboards manual. Danny Hays
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I went ahead and ordered the hardware RAID card, to take the redundancy load off of the CPU. But what would be better:
a. C:\ as two disks in RAID 1 and D:\ as three disks in RAID 5; or
b. putting all five drives in one big RAID 5 array, and then create a logical partition for C:\, and leave the rest for D:\ ?
Since hardware RAID 5 is supposed to be almost as fast as RAID 0, I am wondering if this would be much faster than putting C:\ in a two-disk RAID 1 array (and I would still get fault tolerance).
But if I go with the second route, then how do I make a backup image of C:\? Acronis True Image?
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org -
I would still keep them separate with C: as a RAID 1 and D: as a RAID 5. You want to minimize head contention between your media drive and other drives. It might not matter as much as it once did but I still use that rule of thumb. Others may suggest differently.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I really liked it when I had both C:\ and D:\ in RAID 0. Whenever I rendered, all four cores averaged 95% usage…so I figured that there was no bottleneck on hard drive throughput. However, when I did a test render with a standalone C:\, it was around 70% usage.
They say Hardware RAID 5 is almost as fast as RAID 0. Someone suggested that I could move the optical drive outside of the case, and then put both C:\ and D:\ in separate RAID 5 arrays, with three disks each. That way, both arrays would be redundant/error tolerant, but I would still get speedy throughput.
I remember that at one point external optical drives were not always reliable. Has optical drive technology advanced to the point where external optical drives are reliable? If so, then perhaps I can still have both speed and throughput?
Norman Willis
http://www.nazareneisrael.org
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