Media RAID drive health and efficiency

Storage & Archiving

Media RAID drive health and efficiency

Posted by Nathan Sangster on August 24, 2020 at 2:03 pm

Hi all,

I work for an outdoor video magazine TV show that produces a weekly half hour program. We are currently using Pegusus 2 R4 RAID drives (formatted RAID5) and they are only 6TB of storage in the current formatting. Our computer configurations are 2013 MacPro’s running the latest version of Catalina and Adobe Premier Pro for video editing.

There are several folders with projects that stay on the drives that may be updated over time. Then there are show segment folders that are created and backed up on external drives once they are completed.

With all of the adding and subtracting of segments to the RAID drives there most certainly must be some serious fragmenting of those drives. I have been non-linear editing since the late 90’s and when I started back then it was a no-no to defragment media drives because of the risk of corrupting the data.

I would like to know if there is a way of cleaning up the media that remains on the RAID drive for efficiency and hopefully longer life for the HDs?

Jim Curtis replied 5 years, 8 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Rainer Wirth
August 25, 2020 at 7:51 am

Hi Nathan,

defragmentation on a Raid doesn’t make sense. What would be the order of the defragmentation, when you use 4 HD’s and all the data is written over it?

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems
Nathan Sangster
August 25, 2020 at 11:59 am

Thanks,

I just didn’t know if the physical HD’s would last longer and work more efficiently over time. We did have a disc failure a year and a half ago and the RAID 5 configuration saved our work. I am a firm believer in that configuration.

Nathan
Rainer Wirth
August 26, 2020 at 10:16 am

A disc failure happens from time to time.
For that reason you have a redundant system,

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems
Jim Curtis
September 3, 2020 at 12:55 am

You cut a weekly TV show and only have a 6TB RAID?

You can erase your drive, and copy back from your backups, but then you’re at risk of your backups failing before you copy it back.

There are defrag utilities for 10.15, but the more full the drive is, the longer they take, and they’re kind of slow to begin with.

Any time you copy media, there’s a risk of corruption, and defragging copies your media from one location to another.

It’s more reassuring to me to use a copy program that verifies after copying. I use ChronoSync for copying from one disk to another, but it doesn’t do defragging. But, it does a nice job of only copying changes, which may be useful for the updating folders situation you described.

I’ve never defragged a RAID in 15 or so years, and haven’t had any issues related to fragmentation of which I’m aware.

As my first 8-drive RAID5 got older, I had two drives go bad in one week. That created a nail-biting situation, as what would happen if another drive went bad while the RAID was rebuilding? I’d lose all my data. That would happen.

So, I have two RAIDs, and I mirror my project folders every night, using ChronoSync.

Jim Curtis
jamesphilipcurtis.com

MacPro7,1 24-core – 256 GB RAM – AMD Radeon Pro Vega II 32 GB – 10.15.6

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