-
RAID 5 or 10 for shared VIDEO?
Hi all,
Been reading up on RAID levels and what’s best for performance/redundancy..especially with video.
Our current United Digital RAID is a 12 drive 6TB in RAID10 (formatted = 3TB)
We use this for capture, projects, images, etc..pretty much everything is on there. We have 4 macs sharing off it via Ethernet.OK, so just found out we have another United Digital RAID box sitting at the back of our machine room with no drives in it…
We have a few options: –
– Populate empty box with 12 x 500GB drives and have both BOXES in RAID 5 (+ use one box for capture/footage then one box for projects/assets/renders, etc) ?
– Same as above but both boxes set to RAID 10 instead…or one of each?
– Sell second box and just buy 12 x 1TB drives for our current box to make one big volume for everything in either RAID 5 or 10??
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?
Also, is there any benefit us having 2 separate volumes rather than 1 giant volume?
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 😉
Cheers,
Jim.Production Premium CS4 – Mocha v1.2.3 – FCP 5.1.4
MacPro Quad 3GHz / ATI 1900XT / 8GB RAM / OSX 10.4.11
30″ ACD / Decklink SP / SONY PVM-20M4E/ Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / XServe / United Digital RAID
———————————
Production Premium CS2 – Combustion 3 – Mocha v1.0.1
Win XP Pro 32 / Dell Precision T3400 Q6600 / 4GB RAM / NVidia Quadro570 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 320GB boot/800GB RAID-0 -
7 Replies
-
RAID 10 will always be faster because it’s a simple mirror architechture, just like RAID 0, except as you said, that you need load of drives. RAID 10 has a lot more redunduncy, but even 2 drives failing at once is very unlikely, and I would be more worried about hardware failure if you want to compare odds.
RAID 5 is very processing intentive, so a fast system is going to cost a bundle, and will still be slower than a RAID 0/10.
I guess you have to compare cost of hardware vs cost of drives.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
What do you mean by ‘hardware failure’ Vince? Do you mean the RAID box itself, or server or the individual macs connected to it?
We have UPS on all the server stuff and a nightly tape backup. Or do you mean something else?
Thanks,
Jim.Production Premium CS4 – Mocha v1.2.3 – FCP 5.1.4
MacPro Quad 3GHz / ATI 1900XT / 8GB RAM / OSX 10.4.11
30″ ACD / Decklink SP / SONY PVM-20M4E/ Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / XServe / United Digital RAID
———————————
Production Premium CS2 – Combustion 3 – Mocha v1.0.1
Win XP Pro 32 / Dell Precision T3400 Q6600 / 4GB RAM / NVidia Quadro570 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 320GB boot/800GB RAID-0 -
The RAID card can fail, the motherboard, the powersupply etc.
All of these have the potential of destroying a RAID setup, and it happened to me. A power supply died and sent a spike through the sytem, bad news all around…
Although it is rare, I would not skip the daily backup.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Oh, no we would always keep up the daily backup and UPS stops spike or power failures messing things up. I guess in that respect the redundancy is only there to protect that particular day’s updated work (1 day x 5 ppl’s worth work could still be an expense loss!) and it also enables us to keep working even if 1 or 2 drives fail.
So, I guess if we’ve got enough drives to do it then RAID 10 is a no brainer? RAID 5 has slower read/write speeds and is less redundant – 10 is our only option then?
Production Premium CS4 – Mocha v1.2.3 – FCP 5.1.4
MacPro Quad 3GHz / ATI 1900XT / 8GB RAM / OSX 10.4.11
30″ ACD / Decklink SP / SONY PVM-20M4E/ Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / XServe / United Digital RAID
———————————
Production Premium CS2 – Combustion 3 – Mocha v1.0.1
Win XP Pro 32 / Dell Precision T3400 Q6600 / 4GB RAM / NVidia Quadro570 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 320GB boot/800GB RAID-0 -
Just making sure 🙂
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s a no brainer. At some point, speed is enough to satisfy even the most demanding bit rates, so then a RAID 5 makes sense as you do save quite a few HDs. I find for example that 4 disks striped on our 3ware card is enough for 1080P uncompressed in large projects. And then, it also depends on how many people are accessing the array at the same time.
Vince Becquiot
Kaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
We have a maximum of 4 macs feeding off it at once, via 1GigE – I know that the pipeline ideally needs to be wider, but if we can maximise speed at the server/RAID end then we can look at upgrading to 10GigE/Fiber at a later date I guess.
Production Premium CS4 – Mocha v1.2.3 – FCP 5.1.4
MacPro Quad 3GHz / ATI 1900XT / 8GB RAM / OSX 10.4.11
30″ ACD / Decklink SP / SONY PVM-20M4E/ Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / XServe / United Digital RAID
———————————
Production Premium CS2 – Combustion 3 – Mocha v1.0.1
Win XP Pro 32 / Dell Precision T3400 Q6600 / 4GB RAM / NVidia Quadro570 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 320GB boot/800GB RAID-0 -
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up