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Raid 5 vs JBOD
You don’t need to read everything below if you just want to address the title.
Thanks in advance for your input.My current work flow:
Not that it happens often, but it has happened that a raid gets corrupted or has some kind of problem reported by SoftRaid and/or SMART. When it does, it’s a major pain. I start by backing up my back up. Then I create a new raid and copy over the back up. If its just one drive that is easy – I use RAID 5. That solves the corrupted or dead drive and lets me know it’s time to get four new drives.I back up all my media to individual 6 TB drives. I know there are recommendations for more backups and/or elaborate and expensive plans, but I really can’t afford them and I have researched it.
I organize by putting no more than 4.8 TiBs in folders on the raid so I can do backups to these drives using a dock. I use CCC which works great and is fast and reliable.
It could occur before that day’s back up. It’s not done on the fly. But this is very rare and its not like I’m a touch type editor and I pretty much can remember where I left off.
Regardless or my good or bad habits:
How do you feel about moving to JBODs instead of the faster raids. It would hold as much data. And FCP X and Aperture seem to work fine on non-raided drives. Long renders are longer, and I assume ingesting my camera media cards into the library from a folder on my drive would be longer (I always start by copying the media card to a folder).
Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.
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5 Replies
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JBOD – no. RAID-0 – yes. You can stripe (RAID-0) from the Mac OS disk manager with no further software or RAID hardware. RAID-0 than gives you the aggregate speed of your combined disks while JBOD give you each disk as a separate volume, and therefore you never see better than the speed of a single disk.
Having said that, I’m a strong proponent of RAID-5 if you have no other non-disk backup. If you lose a disk, you can replace it with no data loss. You will either need soft RAID software or a RAID HBA to achieve RAID-5 as it’s not provided in Appple’s default disk management.
If you go with the RAID-5 option, I recommend ATTO’s R680 or ThunderStream.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
Hi Tim. Thanks. I’ve been using raid 5 and today after no problems it was starting to develop errors which means backing up the back up and then reformatting the entire raid. and then copying the back up back to the raid. Not the only time this has happened.
It would be a lot easier to do this with one drive rather than an entire raid. This is in a video class and at the end of the year we keep worth while films exported as finished projects and wipe everything clean. During the year we leave everything as is in case we need to reedit for different purposes.
Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.
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That’s very odd to occur often enough for you to even worry about it. Are you using quality disks, or just desktop/consumer disks thrown together.
The units we sell use Seagate Constellation ES.3.5 enterprise drives and we have systems out there that have 100,000’s of hours and zero disk failures. That you are seeing this type of corruption makes me suspicious of either the drives or the RAID controller that you are using. You don’t mention who’s RAID adapter you are using – is it ATTO or HighPoint?
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters! -
It was formatted using SoftRaid. The drives are still good. 6TB Hitachi’s. I called tech support at OWC and the tech said the drive configuration (or something to that effect) got corrupted. All the data was fine but the drive needed to be re-formmated. I’ve tried editing using a single drive and don’t notice any huge difference. Ingestion of short shoots go fast enough. Editing seems fine. Its not like we are using timelines with 20 “tracks” of audio or tons of compounded clips. The drives are not over 80% full. And they are backed.
Imacs (i7); Canon 5D Mark III/70D, Panasonic HPX250P, FCP X 10.3, teach video production in L.A.
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I’m not exactly sure how the “data was fine” but the drive needed to be reformatted. If you reformat the drive, the data is lost … odd bit of input from OWC.
Tim
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Tim Jones
CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
https://www.tolisgroup.com
BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!
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