Kona RAID level… polling the forum?

[Ramona Howard]

RAID set up really depends on the application and the hardware.

RAID 0 can be used when the video is view as temporary. “I put it here to print it there”, “I just need to see my work”. “I have a backup”

The advantage is there is no rebuild time if a failure occurs. Some may be able to move the backed up content back onto the unit FASTER than it takes to do a rebuild.

RAID 5 offers the ability to loose a drive in the array without loosing the content. Depending on the thruput of your array, you may be able to play content even with a dropped drive, which does not shut you down for hours.

The disadvantage is yes, the rebuild time. Not a disadvantage if your rebuild can happen in the background and your unit can still be used while doing so. If it is not up to par, then you will be dead in the water for hours (the time will depend on the total capacity of your unit).

We have some customers running a Rave in both Raid 0 and Raid 5, since we offer two arrays on every unit and with mirroring and syncing they really get the benefit of both worlds. Oh they are all so clever……

Others run completely in RAID 0, others all in RAID 5.

There is no right or wrong answer here or a black and white one. It all depends on your workflow and the tools, hardware and expertise you have in it.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Jeremy Garchow]

They are both basically the same concept with some slight differences. Raid 3 stores the parity information on one disk, which some say might cause a bottleneck, but it’s not really enough to cause any major problems with the disk. Your HUGE is well capable of uncompressed 1080i video. Raid 3 is similar to Raid 4 in that there’s a dedicated parity disk, but the information gets written differently for each raid level. Raid 5 distributes the parity information all over the raid, which means that there’s no more bottleneck. Some say it causes better speed. In my tests which I first got my RAID, Raid5 didn’t out perform Raid4 so I stuck with Raid4. Honestly, it doesn’t really matter as long as you are getting enough throughput to play back your media and that your raid is protected with whatever level of protection, be it raid 3, 4, 5 or 6.

Jeremy

[Scott Shucher]

So no mention anymore of RAID 3. Is the faster write speed of the RAID 5 that much of an advantage that I should think about re-formatting my RAID 3 drive. With a write speed of 360mb/sec in Raid 3, that certainly seems like enough.