Softraid and benchmark

[Joshua Helling]

@ Ron,

Raid 1 would cut down on the speed significantly as that would simply be a drive mirror. Without an additional controller you could probably do a 0+1 (which would be 2, two drive raid 0’s mirrored together. That would be 50% efficient and only as fast as 2 drives.

Best thing in my opinion is to go with a Raid 5 if you want the redundancy. Raid 5 is a little more efficient than a RAID 3 with the trade off that it WRITES a touch slower (read time is the same). It will also remain working just as fast with one drive in the stripe completely offline.

Unfortunately this requires an additional RAID card to do. Which ties into the next part of this post.

@ Darin,

CalDigit’s HDPro2’s work quite nicely. We use them all the time at shows and in our labs. Easy to setup for both PC and Mac and have excellent performance. They have a great software tool that allows you to even make changes in your RAID type if you decide to change your mind later.

Sincerely,

Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.

[Darin Wooldridge]

Joshua,

Thanks so much for the info.. Due to the amount of sata drive failures I have experienced and the great deal I got on my 2 chassis loaded with fibre I have opted to run fibre.

I’m aware cal digit is great product. Loving the pcie connection. Unfortunately well beyond what I am going to spend on my mac resolve home science project. I’m not sure if you are aware but I use the linex version at the office every daily. I built my home system to see if I could and how it really performs.. I’m currently running 32 10k fibre drives, dual link through an 8gb atto card. As far as I can tell my raid is running much faster than the mac resolve can utilize. When and if I ever run out of bandwidth I will consider a faster option or just add a another 32 drives. 🙂

By that time I am hoping to have a big fat chunk of solid state storage for my 4k stereo playback.

Darin Wooldridge
Colorist / Technical Strategist
818-653-3918-cell
dwooldridge@mac.com
check me out at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Davinci-Resolve-Colorist/117363011609028?ref=….

[Joshua Helling]

Yeah…depending on how that RAID is configured (with 32 drives) you could theoretically be up against how fast the ATTO card is interfacing with the Mac PCI-e bus.

So yeah…you could be hitting the cap there. What are you getting on that drive if you don’t mind me asking? Also what slot do you have it in? Slot 3 or 4 will give access to 8x lanes of PCI-e (which would be full bandwidth for that controller).

The Linux systems have not been tested with the CalDigit or Stardom arrays (other macintosh/windows drive systems we’ve tested), but that is because our testing has been fairly specific when it comes to drive configs on the Linux boxes. That by no means that such a setup wouldn’t work, but we haven’t tested it.

But I 100% agree, that once you’ve been bitten by ANY hard drive failure, it gives you big pause for looking at RAID levels with redundancy. When you are talking about 16 and 32 unit arrays, the idea of loosing all that data make you want to cry.

Sincerely,

Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.

[Darin Wooldridge]

Hello Joshua,

Thanks again for the prompt response.
Would you mind emailing me off the forum to discuss some things..

Best,

Darin Wooldridge
Colorist / Technical Strategist
818-653-3918-cell
dwooldridge@mac.com
check me out at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Davinci-Resolve-Colorist/117363011609028?ref=….

[Joshua Helling]

No problem. I’ll do so now.

Sincerely,

Joshua
Director of Support
Blackmagic Design Inc.