RAID 5 or 10 for shared VIDEO?

[Bob Zelin]

replies below –

I hear RAID 10 is better for redundancy AND speed (read/write) against RAID 5, however you will get more capacity with RAID 5…is this all true for video?

REPLY –
Nonsense. Run RAID 5. End of story.

Also, is there any benefit us having 2 separate volumes rather than 1 giant volume?
REPLY –
yes – 1 giant volume will give you more speed. But 2 seperate volumes will help you keep track of where your media is. For example, edit 1 can be volume 1, but edit 2 can be volume 2. You can still share, but you will have each editor write to their own volume, so keep track of where their files are.

I will post this in a few relevant forums as not sure who is best to ask..I’ve not got total faith in our IT company knowing much about video, so I’m asking the experts instead 😉
REPLY –
I am no expert, but if you can’t trust your IT company, get someone else to help you. Your IT company can destroy your data if they don’t know what they are doing.

Bob Zelin

[Jimmy Brunger]

Thanks for your reply Bob – I was hoping you’d wade in!

Yes, I always thought RAID 5 was the best option for video (some RAIDs run natively in RAID 6 aswell!?)
but after doing some reading I found conflicting info. I’m not saying they’re right and your wrong, but thought you might be interested and as none of these articles talk about video specifically I was interested to hear your take on them:-

https://miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt

https://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/raid5-vs-raid-10-safety-performance.html

https://weblogs.sqlteam.com/billg/archive/2007/06/18/RAID-10-vs.-RAID-5-Performance.aspx

As for the one big volume vs 2 separate – we all tend to work on shared projects, mainly big after effects projects split up into sections, so we all really need to share the same media and we swap whose working on what dependant on workflow/expertise.

My main query with the 1 vs 2 thing was whether having captured video on one raid and other assets/projects/renders on another would speed up data flow or not? Also – would it make sense/be viable to populate BOTH raid boxes with 12 x 500GB drive each and then stripe them together to make one 24 drive 12TB volume in RAID 5 or whatever? I imagine 24 drives is faster than 12 1TB drives…but can you link 2 separate boxes with each one having it’s own controller? Sorry for all the questions!

Our IT company – yes well, they seem ok at general computer/mac/server stuff but they don’t really seem to know much about working with video – which is our area!! They were already in place here before I started, but maybe we need to start looking for someone a bit more specialised!

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[Bob Zelin]

Jimmy –
stop reading articles that do not relate to the video industry.
Raid 4 (recommended by ATTO for the R380 card) is block level RAID 5. Raid 6 is excellent, but you lose performance speed of the array, and of course, more data is compressed in case you lose 2 drives. RAID 6 is excellent, especially with modern large drive arrays (like 16 bay arrays) – but most people don’t want to spend the money for a big box, or lose performance speed. So RAID 4 and RAID 5 are preferable. RAID 3 uses a Parity drive – all the compressed data goes to one drive. So an 8 bay would have one drive dedicated to the compressed data. This is what Medea and HUGE Systems did – but it is no longer popular (and both Medea and HUGE are out of business).

RAID 1 (And RAID 10) uses mirroring. This makes you lose 50% of your data space, and performs at HALF the speed. Let’s make this simple right now. Put two cheap 500 Gig SATA drives in a MAC Pro. Each run at 70Mb/sec. Stripe them together at RAID 0. You now have 1 Terabyte of storage, running at 120Mb/sec. Now, delete the RAID, and create a RAID 1 (mirror). You now have HALF the storage, and if you run AJA System test, you will see that your two drives are back down to 70Mb/sec. There goes your speed.

This is why IT people should NEVER EVER be asked about storage for video professionals. They just don’t get it. So, unlike the articles that you have referenced – RAID 3, 4, 5, 6 are all good ways to go, but RAID 1 or RAID 10 is just stupid. AVID used to use RAID 1 only for AVID Unity – and this is why AVID Unity systems used to cost over $100,000.

Bob Zelin

[Jimmy Brunger]

Hi Bob,

Thanks again for your reply. Well if that’s the case then looks like a RAID 5 would certainly be good enough (we backup nightly to tape anyway) Sorted!

Though, we still have this option to use the additional RAID box we have sat doing nothing at the moment, so what are your thoughts?

We can either: –

– keep the 12 x 500GB box in RAID 5, not use second empty box
– populate the second box in the same way/capacity to have 2 x 6TB volumes
– or populate both boxes and stripe them together to make one giant 12TB/24 drive RAID 5 volume

Still not sure if it’s better having a separate box for capture/footage and one for everything else, or if one big volume is faster. As mentioned before we all share/exchange projects quite frequently so there is no real sense having a separate volume for each workstation in that sense.

Also – as the RAID controller(s) are onboard each RAID box (they are both United Digital RM3112) I didn’t know if you could combine or only use one of the card to control both boxes as one in the 13TB/24 drive config?

Lastly – do you want a transatlantic job as our engineer!!? 😉

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[Bob Zelin]

I never heard of United Digital Raid host controllers. They are not one of the “standard” brands.

Instead of going “trans atlantic” , how about moving your company to sunny Florida – I will be glad to set you up !

Bob
ps – if it were me, I would never create a single 24 drive array.

[Jimmy Brunger]

United Digital sell the whole box – case, processor, controller, drives, software, etc. I don’t know how well it suits video, but it’s what they had installed when I started working there. I guess we need to try work with what we’ve got before shelling out on new kit.

Why not a 24 drive array?

Florida – would love to..

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[Bob Zelin]

Why not a 24 drive array?

This is exactly what RAID 6 is about. There is an expression “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. 24 is just TOO many drives for one volume, but if you must do this, RAID 6 will allow for 2 failures, and decrease the possibility of disaster in case of failure.

Bob Zelin

[Vince Becquiot]

Interesting thread.

Bob,

I think you should take into account the type of RAID hardware used here. Some RAID cards perform questionably in RAID 5 because of the obvious additional processing, while very well in RAID 0, or RAID 10 as is the case of one of our 3ware cards. And that could be an issue with shared storage.

While I completely aggree on the waste of space, etc., I think it should be mentionned that this may not apply to mid range gear.

Cheers,

Vince Becquiot

Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area

[Jimmy Brunger]

We have SCSI>SATA dual band ATTO HBAs I think. Running from a United Digital 3112RM to an XServe and then 1GigE out to 4 macs through a managed switch.

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[Bob Zelin]

Hi Vince –
this is the bottom line. You look at the various adds on Creative Cow, etc. and say “oh, I want this one, I want that one”. The bottom line is that either you have a SAS/SATA RAID 5 host adaptor from ATTO, Areca, or Cal Digit – or forgetaboutit ! You buy cheap crap, you get cheap crap.

Bob Zelin