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Activity Forums AJA Video Systems Raid 3 or not raid 3, that is the question???

  • Raid 3 or not raid 3, that is the question???

    Posted by Keicol on February 28, 2006 at 6:24 pm

    I have two Xserve raids fully populated, should I set up each raid controller and their subsequent drives (4 controllers, 28 drives total) as raid 3 or 5? then pop them alltogether with my disk utility to form a raid 50 or 30? Also in disk utility under the raid tab there’s an option for “raid block size” 32k being default, the help file explains that one should use larger block sizes when using video, the options are 64k, 128k, and 256k? Any suggestions?

    purpose, uncompressed 10bit log RGB capture.

    Thanks, keith

    Bob Zelin replied 20 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Bob Zelin

    March 1, 2006 at 3:45 am

    the default from Apple is hardware RAID5, and then you use the Apple Disk Utility to do a RAID 50 across the busses of your single XServe RAID. This is the recommend setup config from Apple for HD video, and this is the #1 way that almost every XServe RAID is setup that I have seen. This type of config is exactly what AJA and Blackmagic did when they first had to do HD stuff with FCP (before they got involved with third party drive companies like Medea, HUGE, ADTX and others).

    bob Zelin

  • Keicol

    March 1, 2006 at 4:21 am

    I know, and if you ask any of them why raid 5 and not raid 3, or 50 and not 30 they’ll simply say, “that’s what Apple recommends.” I was simply hoping there was another opinion based on experience. The other companies you mentioned all recommend raid 30. I’ll go raid 50, I hate to be on the edge, more than I already am.

    Also, in the disk utility there’s an option button under the raid striping tab that if selected gives the option for raid block size, it’s default is 32k, The folks at Aja said to use the default setting, I read the Apple help file associated with that option and it suggests that the block size should be larger for somethings like video files, who knows??

    Thanks, Keith

  • Bob Zelin

    March 1, 2006 at 7:14 pm

    Keep your block size at 32K (the default) – when I had the bad batch of Hitachi 400 Gig SATA drives, I was told by the SATA host companies to switch to 64K, and things just got worse. Leave it at 32K.

    Bob Zelin

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