To RAID or not to RAID....

[Rod]

Working on designing a workstation to run SS. Starting from scratch and wondering about mirroring or striping hard drives (to preserve workflow in the event of a hard drive problem).

What kind of setup does SS like better, RAID 1 or RAID 0?

On all drives, or just the data drives?

Also, any reason(s) to look at drives faster than 7500 RPM for OS/programs and/or data?

Thanks in advance for sharing the benefit of your experience.

-Rod

[Arco]

from what little i understand you've got to be real careful with software RAID which, i believe, is the kind you're talking about (BIOS controlled). with RAID 0 if one of the drives fails you lose everything 'cuz files are written accross two or more drives. RAID 1 (the redundant kind..where there's always a copy of every file written) can be good but it's not necessary that much faster and it's not necessary with SAW, you get great operation with regular SATA drives.

Hardware RAID is the most "serious" RAID implementations and would probably be very cool for audo. It's more of a hassle though and again, not needed with SAW.

Hardware RAID: "This means using dedicated hardware to control the array, as opposed to doing array control processing via software. Good hardware controllers are in many ways like miniature computers, incorporating dedicated processors that exceed the power of processors that ran entire PCs just a few years ago."

Hardware RAID info link (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/conf/ctrlHardware-c.html)

quote from Soundsuite (SAW user):


Remember raid 0 (striped, the most popular and economic per performance) is walking the line and you are relying on regular backups...if one drive fails, all data goes poof on both drives instantly...it's fast though.

With the newer systems, especially with a Core2, you're just going to be so fast you won't need to risk this kind of setup. My newest system is running a dualcore athlon and it's super fast and i still haven't pushed it too its limits. I imagine the newer core2 systems will be a good bit faster so no need to worry about RAID.

[Bob L]

I constantly find myself doing 35-45 track sessions with all the processing I need using just USB 2.0 external drives... internal 7200 are much faster than that... and I can't imagine that any RAID is going to add to the performance already attained with SS with common drive setups.

If you are going to be doing full screen uncompressed video capture and processing, then perhaps a Raid may help... but for SS... keep it simple.

Bob L

[jarvissound]

Hello,

I just had a RAID 0 Stripe set bite the dust--good thing I had backup! RAID 0 is theoretically twice as fast as a single drive. I can tell you its not twice as fast in practice but faster enough to make it worth doing. The only real disadvantage to RAID 0 is it doubles the probability of a failure, meaning you now have two drives that can fail, and if either does your data is lost. If you are running a single HDD and it fails you've lost your data as well, its just half as probable as it would be with RAID 0. Raid 1 is whats known as a mirror, meaning it gives you (in theory) redundancy, in that all data is put to each drive. The disadvantages of RAID 1 are a)it ain't no faster than a single drive, perhaps even slower. b) you only get the storage capacity of 1 drive meaning if you've got 2-200GB drives your drive capacity is only 200 GB with them hooked up, with RAID 0 you get all 400GB....c)even RAID 1 is not infallible, meaning it doesn't always give you seamless redundancy. I had a show where Windows F'd up something about 30 minutes before curtain on opening night with the NY Times there and the machine wouldn't start off of either drive in a RAID 1 Mirror set. We cancelled the show and it didn't get reviewed--BAD! The production sound engineer spec'd the RAID 1 and I told them the only way to get real backup is to have 2 seperate computers and they didn't believe me. Too bad for them...

So I'd say that doing backups regularly(Ghost is a great tool) and keeping those disks off site is the best way to keep your data safe. If you want speed, by all means get you a mobo with a RAID controller and RAID 0 those boys. It is VERY fast. Things like Build Mix and drawing Wave Data files will be much faster. Disk intensive VSTi's like Ivory love the RAID sets when you've got them rocking, much fewer "slow disk" lights. The new machine I'm installing software on now has a 250GB System Drive for Windows and my critical data. My Sample Data/VSTi working drive will be 2-250GB drives RAID 0. So I think RAID arrays are great--until they bite the dust. So go for it--just Back Up Your Data!!

FWIW,
Brett

[Tim Miskimon]

I don't find it necessary to use a Raid setup with SAW.
What I do is make sure I backup to few external drives about every hour or so during a session.
I do it right after some major overdubbing has just been finished or a freshly cut take that everyone agrees is the keeper.
It only takes a few minutes and can be done during a pee break or something.
Nothing like having that extra peace of mind in the event of a drive failure.

[Bill Park]

Working on designing a workstation to run SS. Starting from scratch and wondering about mirroring or striping hard drives (to preserve workflow in the event of a hard drive problem).

What kind of setup does SS like better, RAID 1 or RAID 0?

On all drives, or just the data drives?

Also, any reason(s) to look at drives faster than 7500 RPM for OS/programs and/or data?



-Rod

Rod,

This quesion pops up all the time, and seems pretty logical. Not many of the long time SAWers have bothered. I did, a long time ago, and I found no point to it. (It sure was expensive though...)

If you MUST have a RAID, you want a hardware RAID that is created prior to the OS loading, and you want either 10 or 01 (I forget... sorry...).

Really, the 7200 rpm drives do all that I need. I guess you could go for the 10,000 or 15,000 rpm versions. I had more drive failures with SCSI and RAID than I have had since with the common cheaper drives.

Bill

[MMP]

Every time I have tried Raid, the bus loading caused other system problems that made it unworkable.

Regards,

MM

[tomasino]

Raid is slower on writes and takes a read or two before you see the performance on reads. Not worth the tweak. Even 10K rpm drives have too many trade offs (heat & noise). Keep it simple and big.

[jarvissound]

Every time I have tried Raid, the bus loading caused other system problems that made it unworkable.

Regards,

MM

Michael were you experiencing these problems even with a hardware RAID controller?

Brett

[MMP]

Promise controllers built into motherboards on two different computers.

I found today's drives fast enough for my needs, so I haven't had need of looking for a few years, so my info could be dated.

Regards,

MM