Hello,

If I ever choose to go the RAID way, should I go with the mobo built-in SATA RAID controller or buy a card?
Just in case it helps I have the Asus PX79WS in mind for mobo
Thanks

I prefer to have an external RAID5 enclosure such as those made by Stardom. With the hard drives outside the computer box, it negates the heat issues from extra drives. Bring made of very solid aluminium, a 4 drive unit on the floor (connected by eSATA) also doubles as a handy foot rest.

Andrew

Hello,

If I ever choose to go the RAID way, should I go with the mobo built-in SATA RAID controller or buy a card?
Just in case it helps I have the Asus PX79WS in mind for mobo
Thanks

It depends on what RAID you want, and what kind of performance you are looking for.

Choices are:
1. Software RAID - great for RAID 0 or 1
2. Mobo RAID - great for less number of drives and NAS
3. Fake RAID - great for simple RAIDs that aren't mission critical
4. Hardware RAID - all mission critical stuff - the range goes from cheap to extremely expensive

Hope this helps.

It isn't even that simple............

When I had this machine built, the MoBo had two different Raid controller chips on board, a 4 channel Silicon Image and a 4 channel NVidia.

The first build used the Silicon Image chip (two 250 gig mirrored C drives, two 500 gig striped D drives), and it ran like a complete dog, the I/O specs were utterly woefull.

Build two used the NVidia chip, and it ran like a rocket, double the throughput of the Silicon Image chip.

Exit SI chip permanently, gotta watch those chipsets, they're dangerous territory.


CS

if you use raid5, you need to take care that Raid5 is very finnicky about controller and bios.
if your motherboard dies, there are chance you won't be able to find the same one.
and there are chances you won't be able to rebuild your drive array.
If you take a controller, you will get probably better performance and more chance youre raid array will work into another computer if you transplant both drives and controller.
if you use simple raid 1 or 0 this could be easier.

Thanks for your suggestions. Yes, those guys at Videoguys nicely forget to tell you how finnicky Raid5 is.

I got my Stardom RAID5 unit from Videoguys and I haven't found the RAID to be finicky at all. It just works.

Andrew

Some general remarks about the various raid options:

Motherboard raid: Perfectly acceptable performance for raid0/1, but a complete disaster for parity raids (raid5) because of the CPU overhead and very sluggish rebuild times.

External raid: With a small number of disks (up to four) and an eSATA connection, the effective sustained transfer rate is limited to around 280 MB/s maximum, so it is useless to create a large external array.

Dedicated controller: Costly, but it is very easy to achieve sustained transfer rates over 1000 MB/s, rebuild times are the best for all raid levels and the cache memory can be expanded for improved performance on a select number of cards.

As always, you get what you pay for. Whether you need all that speed depends on the source material and the editing style.

On the Adobe Premiere Pro Hardware forums there are a few articles about Raids and Rebuild issues that may be of interest. Start in the FAQ section.

Another interesting piece may be http://ppbm7.com/index.php/intro-part-1 about building a new system with the P9X79 WS motherboard.

Okay .... hands up those of us who need sustained data transfer rates of more than 280MB/sec?

Andrew

I do. A simple 7 track timeline, of which only a single track was RED 4K and the rest was MXF 422, XDCAM and AVCHD required more than 300 MB/s. If you add a second track of RED or EPIC material, you will need way more.

Okay .... hands up those of us who need sustained data transfer rates of more than 280MB/sec?

Andrew

I'm tinkering with the idea of building a 1 GB/s RAID 10 array for a personal project.

LOL. Show-off! :-P

Andrew

I'll show off when I've built it!!

Don't forget the photos.

Andrew

I thought I'd post here rather than starting a new thread.
Some advice would save me a lot of Googling.
Im looking for a Raid card to take 4 internal 1TB sata drives to make 2 x 2TB arrays. (6 inputs would be nice but not a necessity)
I need to be able to use the arrays in Windows and Mac. (my fake raid Adaptec 1430SA is fine for performance in Windows, but has no Mac drivers)
Only need Raid 0 and JBOD.
Really looking for something just like my GRaid external enclosure, shows up to either OS as one big drive, but to be internal.
Any help appreciated.

Might want to double-check that your computer box can take the heat load (fans etc) before adding the hard drives.

Andrew

Thanks Andrew,
Its all good, its all there and running now, just with a cheap Adaptec raid card that i cant use on the OSX side.
I dont really need any more performance than what I have now, just the ability to use the arrays on both OS's.

Fantastic to hear. BTW, best wishes to your production manager.

Andrew

Lol
Thank you
:-)

Depends on what you need from it; speed versus redundancy, hot swappable, etc. My machine is used primarily as a media server (everything on the on-board RAID), second as a work-at-home machine (ARECA and RAMDisk), and lastly, and very seldom, as a gaming machine.

I have 14 drives in my machine. One SSD for Boot/Installs, 8 2.5" drives on an ARECA card for media/cache/etc, 4 2.5" drives on the on-board RAID controller (for my music, movies, other programs, and misc stuff), and one 3TB internal HDD for a backup to the ARECA raid array, plus external backups.

That comes down to 4 virtual disks; the SSD and 3TB are the slowest (250MB sustained and 90MB sustained each), the ARECA is the fastest (520MB sustained in RAID5), and the on-board is mostly for my own stuff (280MB sustained), as per ATTO and other tests. I also have 24GB of RAM, so for previews and disk cache, i use a 7.5GB RAMDisk, giving me 16.5 GB for Win7 and PP or AE, which dramatically speeds up previews in short clips with complex effects or multitrack/multicam work (ad work etc).

They are all in a HAF-932 with plenty of cooling, the ARECA HDD's are in hot swappable backplane modules, all the rest are internals, spaced out, with adequate cooling.

Next machine, i will likely build with a more advanced/faster RAID controller, 2 SSD's in RAID 1, 12 full size HDD's, faster 6-core processor, and 64 or more GB of RAM, and utilize a 20-30GB RAMDisk as well, and back it all up externally.