MacPro – RAID 0 +1

[Richard Martz]

Use DIsc Utilities to set up everything.

Richard Martz
MagicMartz Media

Final Cut Pro HD
Kona LH
After Effects
PhotoShop
Illustrator
Lots of other Fun Stuff!

[David Roth weiss]

[steve997] “My question: does MAC or FCP allow me to do a RAID 0+1?”

Steve,

Mac’s Disk Utility allows Raid-0 or Raid-1. Raid-1 is otherwise known as “mirroring,” and gives you redundancy, but with half the storage space and a big cut in throughput. Rather than use Raid-1 I would recommend instead that you use Raid-0 for maximum storage and maximum throughput, both of which are essential to a happy edit bay.

Redundancy is nice, and it might save your butt someday, but it won’t make your day to day life as an editor better the way that drive speed and drive space will. Backup to inexpensive firewire drives if you’re really concerned, thats a much better use of resources.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

[Zak Mussig]

Are you planning on putting the system drive in the second optical bay? That’s an option since you mentioned 5 total drives and the Mac Pro has 4 drive bays.

I agree with David. You’ll be happier striping all of your media drives into 1 big RAID 0. If redundancy is an issue, just get a big firewire 800 drive and use it automated or manual backups of your RAID.

Zak

[Steve Voyk]

Hi guys,
Yes, I was planning to go to the superdrive bay for the system drive. But it seems to me that I can’t do RAID 0 AND 1, only 0 OR 1.

In that case, let’s say I use two drives striped together, another drive as a system drive and another as the backup. Is it easy to backup from the striped drives to the backup drive internally?

Is it something the MAC can do automatically or will it be a nightly manual procedure?

Regards and thanks for your replies,
Steve

[Mark Maness]

ALWAYS make sure that your absolutely unreplaceable components are backed up on a seperate drive. Shows can be redigitized but components can’t be rebuilt easily and quickly.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com

[Alan Okey]

Yes, you can create RAID 0+1 on a Mac Pro using Apple’s Disk Utility.

Here is the proper procedure, from Apple’s support website:

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304377

Good luck.

[Alan Okey]

Additional details:

https://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?p=373125

Judging from the comments on the thread, you might want to consider SoftRaid. Also, this could be useful:

“It is recommended to mirror the drives first and then stripe them(raid 1+0). This way if you lose any drive you only have to rebuild one drive after the swap. If you do it the other way around (stripe first), then you have to rebuild a striped volume set from the mirror and this means rebuilding 2 drives even if just one failed.”

Good luck.

[Ian Maclean]

Thanks for that very useful link, Alan.

I need the same info on RAID setup. I’ve got the Firmtek 5 bay enclosure, and eSata card to augment my Mac Pro Octo. A tech support guy at firmtech recommended the new terabyte drives from Samsung, and at that price and with those good reviews, I just bought five. (five terabytes! I’m pretty stoked).

I want to do high def video editing. I’ve formated the drives (non journaled), and will use a large block size when configuring my RAID setup.

I’d like to stripe two of the drives, and use them as a Final Cut Pro scratch disk. This should be fast enough by a comfortable margin for capturing the 720p 30fps workflow I have in mind. Then I’d like to mirror those two with two more as backup. This would be a RAID 0+1.

Disk Utility can apparently do it (thanks again Alan). However, Firmtek support said they’ve tried it, but haven’t been able to get it to work, and not just on an external enclosure, so I don’t know:

“I tried that Apple Tech note with direct connect and SATA PM enclosures. I even tried it with
internal Mac Pro hard drives. It failed. I asked on the Apple discussion boards and everyone
else that wrote back said they had the same issue.”

I also don’t understand how doing it 1+0 wouldn’t lose the speed advantage of doing the striping first (0+1).

And even doing it 0+1, my concern is that the mirror process is slower than the stripe process, and somehow will slow down read/write speeds to the scratch disk(s). There doesn’t seem to be a lot of experience in this area. I may just backup the first striped pair to others with backup software. Any suggestions from anyone who’s actually gotten RAID 01 working on Leopard most welcome.

[Ian Maclean]

I may post a new topic using the name ‘Nested RAID levels,’ which is the topic at hand, according to Wikipedia phraseology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels

I’m having trouble understanding these options. I had visualized the setup incorrectly. The diagrams on the Wiki page help a lot. Maybe RAID10 is a better option.

[Ian Maclean]

I haven’t been able to find anyone using a nested RAID (such as 10) successfully, so will go with a striped RAID as FCP scratch disk, and conventionally back up that RAID set.

The good news is that all of this becomes obsolete in 12 months or less when Snow Leopard (with Sun’s open source filesystem ZFS) comes out:
https://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=335

“No more Disk Warrior
Data corruption on PCs and Macs is a sad and stupid fact of life. Power failures, flaky RAM, poor grounding, (slowly) failing hard drives, driver glitches, phantom writes and more conspire to rot your data.

ZFS eliminates that. All blocks are checksummed and the checksum is stored in a parent block. ZFS always knows if the block is correct and/or corrupt. Every block has a parent block (with one obvious exception that gets special treatment), so the entire data store is self-validating. You’ll never have to wonder if all your data is correct again. It is.

No RAID cards or controllers
ZFS implements very fast RAID that fixes the performance knock-off against software RAID. In ZFS all writes are the fastest kind: full stripe writes. And the RAID is running on the fastest processor in your system (your Mac), rather than some 3-5 year old microcontroller.

Just add drives to your system and you have a fast RAID system. With Serial Attach SCSI and SATA drives you’ll pay for the drives (cheap and getting cheaper), cables and enclosures.

No more volumes
Every time you add a disk to your Mac you see another disk icon on the desktop. If you want to RAID some disks you use Disk Utility (or something) to create the volume. Slow, error-prone, confusing.

ZFS eliminates the whole volume concept. Add a disk or five to your system and it joins your storage pool. More capacity. Not more management.

Backup made easy
ZFS does something called snapshot copy, which creates a copy of all your data at whatever point in time you want. Copy the snapshot up to a disk, tape or NAS box and you are backed up.

Create a snapshot on every write if you want, so if your database barfs you can go back to just before it choked.”