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Best RAID Block size?
I recently put together a new RAID array with 4 Maxtor Maxline 300gig HDs with 16mb cache and two Firmtek dual hard drive enclosures. When I went to Disk Untility to format and raid the hard drives together, one of the options I had was for the RAID block size where I could choose from 32k all the way up to 256k. I was just curious what exactly this means/is for and what would be the best setting for Final Cut usage?
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3 Replies
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for video use, larger block sizes should give better performance
you would choose smaller block sizes if, for example, you were using your raid to host a database.
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I made my block size the largest size as well.
I am curious- have you had any problems with the Maxtors?
I have a 4 drive SATA raid with the 4 port firmtek card with the same drives.
Things started out rocky- lots of dropped frames but after a lot of experimenting and finally re-building the system from scratch things have settled down.
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Hmmm…I have never had any problems with this current RAID set up. I just hooked everything up, created the RAID via Apple’s Disc Utility and it was up and running great.
I just tested the RAID Block size on 32k vs 256K and ran some performance tests with Xbench (one of the programs that Bear Feats uses to test RAID arrays) and I found that the RAID block at 32k ran faster than the 256K by a good deal. Xbench tests uncached read write and other random tests with information in blocks of 4k and 256k and at 32k Xbench showed that the RAID array was reading at over 80mbs faster. Don’t know if this test directly relates to the size of files used in Final Cut, but I think i might keep it at 32k for a while.
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