Is there any cheap or free software to set up a RAID 5?

[Noam Osband]

Isn’t a SoftRAID going to be faster than FW800? I’ll be working with lots of data so I figured I might as well do this now before I get too deep into the project. Do you know any good articles comparing their speed?

[Nick Toth]

I’m not comparing FW800 to SoftRAID. According to the SoftRAID website they claim performance with a 4 drive RAID 5 of around 500 MB/sec read/write. The best you are going to get from FW800 is 50-75 MB/sec. My point was that for some of my less complex long-form 1080p projects FW800 has worked fine. The more speed the better of course.

[Jim Wiseman]

I’m getting 450 to above 500MB/sec read and writes with 4 Toshiba 5TB drives in a Thunderbay 4 with SoftRaid. All from OWC. This is on the outer 30% or so of the drive bands. Reads are slightly faster than writes, of course. These are quick drives to begin with, but I doubt if hardware controllers would be much faster for the RAID 5. That is plenty fast for me doing 1080p HD. As I recall it ticks all the boxes but one, 1080 60P if my recollection is correct, on the Blackmagic disk test. Like any setup they will get slower as the drives fill, but still plenty fast for 1080p HD.

Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.1, Final Cut Studio 2 and 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC, 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500, Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD

[John Rofrano]

[Noam Osband] “Is it the kind of thing you need once or do you need to run that software every time you use the RAID?”

I see no one answered this question. It’s something you run all the time. You need to understand how a RAID 5 works. Every time you write a byte of data to the array, a checksum needs to be calculated and written to a stripe on a different drive. This is how it achieves redundancy. If a drive fails, you can rebuilt the data that was on it from the checksums on the other drives. Therefore, the software must be constantly running in the background making calculations and additional writes and these calculations do have CPU overhead so the performance will be gated by your CPU’s ability to do these calculations while it doing all the other processing like FX on your videos, rendering, etc. at the same time.

I had a software RAID 5 and I was not happy with the performance. I now have an Apple RAID Card (hardware RAID) and the performance is much better because the card does all the calculations and buffers the additional writes leaving my CPU free for other things. I also have a CineRAID enclosure which is a hardware RAID 5 and that performs great as well. I guess software RAID is your only choice at this point since you purchased a non-RAID enclosure already but in the future, try and get a hardware RAID solution. They will always perform better.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Noam Osband]

I”m doing some research. I have a 2013 retina MBP. Im gathering a Apple RAID card won’t work for me. Am I right on this?

It seems like if I am going to convert my Thunderbay to RAID 5 I’ll need to go the software route. Most of the editing I do is doc stuff that isn’t too graphics or effects intensive. It leaves me optimistic it wont compromise performance too much.

[John Rofrano]

[Noam Osband] “Im gathering a Apple RAID card won’t work for me. Am I right on this?”

Yea, it’s a card for the 2008 – 2012 Mac Pro.

[Noam Osband] “It seems like if I am going to convert my Thunderbay to RAID 5 I’ll need to go the software route.”

Yea, that does sound like the best option for you at this point. Just remember for the future to get an enclosure that has hardware RAID for best performance.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com