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RAID-0 or other setup for speed AND data safety?
Posted htis on the BMD board aswell, but thought you guys would be in similar situ to mayself and might have some ideas?…
I have been looking into alternative storage solutions for my graphics station, using a Decklink Pro for uncompressed SD…
A 2 or 3 x SATA RAID-0 setup has been suggested and a sep drive for OS/apps.
Talking to our IT guy about this setup, he has warned me that RAID-0 would mean full data (video) loss if one of the drives went. This is no good obviously! Though talking to many AE/Premiere, etc users on the COW it seems many use this RAID-0 setup. How do people make sure their work is safe from drive failure then?I need a solution that gives me improved read/write speed for capture & playback, but also a constant backup for projects/assets/footage.
I currently run 1 x 110gb IDE system drive and 1 x 80gb SCSI media/client drive, both internal. Obviously 80GB is nowhere near enough for video, but I mainly work on stills (Photoshop and a bit of 5-10 sec animation) at present and I currently backup all my client files onto the system drive on a nightly backup file.
I will soon be working with more footage and storing it locally so need a bigger, faster storage solution but one that protects me from drive failure. I will probably winrar footage and backup individ projects onto DVD-R for archiving every week or so, but need protection inbetween.
What are my best options in people’s opinions? I’m looking for about 500GB storage (7200rpm drives) and ideally spending under
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6 Replies
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I use RAID 0. I have 4 x 300GB striped in a RAID 0 config. My backup for media is the tapes that I always keep. For my projects, they go to my c: drive which is a 74GB 10k RPM drive.I back up the projects on the C drive every project.
Renders go to the RAID. I don’t back them up as I can easily re-render.
RAID 0 is not the safest method as your IT guy pointed out, but for me speed was the key. There are other RAID options out there. If you want to be really sure, then I would suggest reading some IT sites about RAID configs. I would also suggest getting a USB drive and backing up to there. Data transfer speeds of USB 2.0 are great, so backing up a project whilst working on it is quick and rather painless.
Mark
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My main workstation is equipped with 2 TB of RAID 5 storage, across 8 physical drives. For more security than RAID 0 you should look into RAID 5 or 6. (RAID 5 uses 1 parity drive, RAID 6 uses two, which means you could lose two drives and still be okay…).
For me it is a matter of short-term reliability. Even though I can re-render – if a drive breaks a day before deadline on a project with around 48 hours of combined rendering… I just don’t want to have to tell the client I had hardware problems. They don’t need to know any of that. So having redundancy in storage and machines is important to me. It costs, but the price of losing a client because I missed the deadline would be a lot higher.
In short I’d stay away from RAID 0 personally – and look into RAID 5 or 6 – and preferably with a RAID board that does hardware RAID, and doesn’t load the host CPU with the RAID calculations.
Bar3nd
Forum COWmunity leader for:
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Thinking it through I think I will go for an SATA RAID-0 of 2x250gb disks for source footage/renders and then my 80GB scsi drive for projects/PSD’s, etc. then I would have a backup set up for my scsi>system drive every night.
Does that sound like a good workflow?
I’m presuming Premiere (what I’d be using to capture/playout) can keep a log of certain tapes and timecodes for automatic re-capture, should I lose my footage?
One other thing….my current board only supports software RAID 0 – which has got me thinking…I hear that software RAID can put a strain on the CPU and my CPU is right on the cusp of min spec as it is – will this s/ware RAID make my system go bonkers?
Thanks for your help guys.
*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation -
[jimmybee500] “One other thing….my current board only supports software RAID 0 – which has got me thinking…I hear that software RAID can put a strain on the CPU and my CPU is right on the cusp of min spec as it is – will this s/ware RAID make my system go bonkers?”
I’ve never tried this myself, so my insight on software RAID is from reading reviews. But I’ve seen numbers in the region of 50% CPU load on software RAID 5 (when doing 200 MB/s or more…).
RAID 0 seems a lot less complex than having to calculate parity bits, so software RAID 0 may not be that heavy on the CPU, but it’ll be there.
Since money seems to be an issue, it seems to be the only solution available for you at the moment.
Bar3nd
Forum COWmunity leader for:
ADOBE AFTER EFFECTS
MAGIC BULLET SUITE
INDIE FILM & DOCUMENTARY -
I’ve since been informed that a 2xdrive RAID 0 should hardly register with the processor, so I should be ok.
Thanks for the input though.
*AE 5.5 Pro – *PS CS1 – *Combustion 3
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Win XP Pro SP2 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / BMD DeckLink Pro / Sony BVM-20G1E / DVS SDI Clipstation -
[jimmybee500] “What are my best options in people’s opinions? I’m looking for about 500GB storage (7200rpm drives) and ideally spending under
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