RAID 5 or RAID 10?

[Jimmy Brunger]

Thanks for the reply Walter. Yeah I always used to think RAID 5 was the best balance..but I’ve recently been reading that (if you have enough drives in the RAID) RAID 10 is far superior…apparently RAID 5 has quite a low write speed, but not a bad read speed which is why I’m wondering if 5 might be better for capture/media drive and RAID 10 on project/render stuff??

RAID 10 is supposed to be as fast as RAID 0, but it has same redundancy as RAID 1. I don’t know what to believe!

Where’s Bob Zelin when you need him 😉

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

[Walter Biscardi]

I run RAID 5 here. I’ve found this is a great balance between protection of the media and speed.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!

[Walter Biscardi]

[Jimmy Brunger] “apparently RAID 5 has quite a low write speed, but not a bad read speed which is why I’m wondering if 5 might be better for capture/media drive and RAID 10 on project/render stuff?? “

500 to 700MB/s + on our systems. in RAID 5. Not sure where you’re hearing the slow read speeds from, but I’ve been running our arrays in RAID 5 going on 2 years now. Never saw anything slow. The absolute slowest speeds I’ve ever seen on our systems is 350MB/s when they are getting pretty full.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!

[Jimmy Brunger]

This is what I mean…several ppl saying 5 is best, then a load more warning against it. Hmmm…

6 of one, half a dozen of the other?

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

[Nick Hasson]

I have been running raid 5 for a couple of years. 8 drives and it runs at 450MB a sec. Both read and write. When it gets really full, read speed drops to 350mb a sec. Still plenty fast for hd or 2k.

Nick Hasson
Editor/coloirist
http://www.niceedits.com
Smoke/FCP/Apple Color.

[Jimmy Brunger]

Our RAID is serving 4-5 people at once though – more reads and writes simultaneously and more to lose if a drive or two goes down at once. I wonder if this ‘more processor intensive’ thing I’ve been hearing about RAID 5 only really applies if you are using a software RAID, rather than a dedicated hardware RAID controller?..

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

[Walter Biscardi]

[Jimmy Brunger] “I wonder if this ‘more processor intensive’ thing I’ve been hearing about RAID 5 only really applies if you are using a software RAID, rather than a dedicated hardware RAID controller?.. “

No clue really. We have three primary FCP workstations and three iMacs that work off the SAN daily. We’re pretty much exclusively cutting and managing HD content here.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!

[Brent Hilgenkamp]

Your RAID 5 write speeds depend on how fast your RAID controller is. If you are using a software RAID controller then yes, RAID 5 is painfully slow as there is no dedicated hardware for the controller to use to create the parity information. If you go RAID 5 be sure that it is a true hardware controller.

Now for read speeds. Take for example a 12 drive array. If you do RAID 10 you only have 6 spindles reading the data. If you have a RAID 5 with 12 drives you now get 11 spindles reading the data – much faster than the RAID 10. (This assumes your controller is not using the parity information for reads. This is an option on Xserve RAIDs – not sure if yours has this option or not – if it does leave it off unless you have reason to turn it on.)

As far as redundancy goes you could technically lose 6 drives in the RAID 10 and still be fine, but you can only lose 1 drive in the RAID 5.

Personally I would go with a RAID 5 due to the speed and capacity of it, but it’s really up to you to pick which is more important to you.

Also, if you do go with getting 12 1TB drives I would recommend RAID 6 if you have the option. 12 TB is kind of a magic number with RAID 5 – might wanna read this before you think about doing a 12 TB RAID 5 – https://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=162
Although with RAID 6 you will essentially lose another drive for parity information, so your 12 TB is now down to 10 TB.

[Chris Trahey]

With the same number of drives, the breakdown is like this:
RAID 5: Much better read performance, theoretically MUCH slower writes.
RAID 10: balanced read/write, with the read performance roughly equivalent to the RAID 5 with half the number of drives -1.

Take my latest two servers for example:
One has a set of 6 drives, and I needed balanced read/write, so I choose RAID 10 (which is essentially a 3-drive stripe in terms of performance).
The other has only four drives, but I do not need write performance, so I choose RAID 5, which give the same read performance on these 4 drives as a RAID 10 on 6 (3 drives striped).

So it depends on what you are using the server for. If you are only streaming off of it, choose RAID 5, you’ll have BETTER READ speeds with the same number of drives, AND increased capacity.
If you need to write to it (Render Cache), RAID 5 will in theory be slower. Of course a great card goes a long way.
If you care a shred for performance, don’t use RAID 5 software.

[Jonathan Fleckenstein]

I’ve found that RAID 5 is efficient when it comes to the amount of storage that a user gets, but it generally has very slow write speeds which would be somewhat annoying when working with large video files. I would probably recommend RAID 10 if you’re using it with Final Cut as you will most likely be doing a lot of reading and writing.

Optimiz3.com Finding the best way to get stuff done.