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Setting up a new raid – what values do I pick?
I’m setting up a 5 drive raid0 and using disk utility to set up the aray. I’m stumped on which format to chose. Also what block size to pick.
I’ll have 2.3tb so will have 4 partitions that I can also set up in disk utility–i’m guessing.
The 5 drives all show up and I’ve moved them into the box to create the striped array but I didn’t know the answers to the above questions.
This will be for FCP studio2 doing both SD and HD projects. It’s a G5 8-core and running 10.49. A PCIe card is handling the drives through a single esata cable.
I’m looking for maximum throughput.
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6 Replies
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Forget the partitions, stripe all five drives together as one. Partitions tend to slow down FCP and require added calls to disk.
As far as block size is concerned, thats not terribly critical. You can choose something in the middle or do some tests to find the absolute sweet spot. I think barefeets.com may have published a test on that subject.
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles -
I read in several places that 256k was the best for video editing. When setting up my raid, I tested a few different settings using the AJA System Test and it did not seem to make any discernable difference (though I would not claim to be an expert in these things). I ended up going with 256k.
David is correct…forget partitons. They just cause a performance hit.
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I think my engineer felt that it would take days to degfrag the drives if it was all one partition where as not so long (each)if it was four. Which brings up another question. Caldigit told me you never needed to defrag a raid but my engineer still thinks that’s necessary especially with video files.
Also no one has said which of the 5 or 6 choices it should be for formatting (see original message) I’m guessing just Mac OS extended but I only think that because it seems to have the least baggage with no extra names after it. Any other ideas?
Thanks! -
[audioeditor] “I’m guessing just Mac OS extended”
Correct!!!
Tell your engineer to quit living in the past. Defragging is so 90’s.
And, don’t setup the most important part of your computer so it fuctions best during maintainance, set it up so it functions best when you’re doing your work.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles -
[David Roth Weiss] “Tell your engineer to quit living in the past. Defragging is so 90’s.”
With the newer O/S file systems becoming more effcient on data placement of disks this is entirely true.
Defragging a storage array shouldn’t ever be needed anyways.
I know on my setup we only have the clients projects and files on there until the project is done then it gets archived and removed.Every few months our framestore is 90% cleared out.
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[audioeditor] “I’m looking for maximum throughput.
“Sounds like you know what you want but, even for HD, can you not achieve maximum throughput for several layers of real time with just two drives?
Personally, I would not use a RAID that included all available drives unless I had a clear and competently tested backup system in place. If one of the five go down, the whole RAID is lost.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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