RAID and hard drive set, couple of questions.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

Hi Randall,

I strongly disagree with this statement about compatibility with the Intel ICH raid. I have lost data due to the Intel raid dropping a WD drive from a Raid 0 array even though the drive was fine. The Intel software Raid cannot distinguish between a bad drive and a drive taking too long to respond. It drops the drive and a rebuild is required or data is lost if Raid 0. Also, a pro hardware raid controller can automatically reallocate bad sectors when writing to an array while the Intel software raid cannot. I became aware of this when my 3ware's alarm went off notifying me that a few bad sectors were being written to, so, it was able to hold the unwritten data in cache and find new sectors for this data. This happened about 3 years ago, so, I might not be remembering everything the 3ware software said. However, I recall investigating it and do remember that the Intel raid could not do the same thing.

I only went by what was elsewhere on the Web. I have never run any WD drives in any RAID array.

By the way, I have moved the two Seagate drives to my auxiliary rig when I acquired two 1TB Samsung F3 hard drives for my main rig. The only Western Digital hard drive in that main rig is a single 2TB Black, which is used as my output drive. That drive is not in a RAID array. (Two of the three Samsungs are in a RAID 0 array in my main system.)

The 1TB Samsung F3 is also available in a RAID-ready version, the F3R, for $10 more than the plain F3. Only buy that F3R for RAID 3/5/6 or for any combination RAID level involving one of those three parity RAID levels.

My auxiliary rig does have a single 1TB Black - as the system drive. The two Seagate drives are in RAID 0.

[Panagiotis Raris]

i had no problems with WD drives (500GB units from 2007; identical) in RAID0 on a G33 ICH9R intel motherboard. Same with a pair of Seagate 7200.11 (the drive notorious for randomly dying) in RAID0, i didnt have any issues for about 6 months until one of the WD's developed bad sectors and eventually kicked the bucket. However, everyone else claims problems with the WD's, so i avoid them for RAID, and use them for storage only or backups.

i have had a WD Caviar Black and Caviar Green suddenly die, and the aforementioned 'bad sector' WD that was part of the RAID0 array.

all of my RAID array drives are identical Fujitsu notebook 7200RPM drives (and i keep spares around), and all storage drives are 1 yr old Seagates, while boot drives are Intel X25M's. This has proven to be the most reliable and efficient and also pretty cost effective.

[Scott Chichelli]

Originally Posted by Jeff Troiano

I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about setting up a RAID, for my new computer.

This is what I want to do.

Single main drive (C:), possible SSD

2 seperate RAID 0 setups, 2x2 7200rpm drives (1 for project files, and 1 for cache)

Then another drive (something like a 1 or 2 tb drive, for storage)

first, would this be an ideal set up for using with CS5?, 2nd, do I need 2 separate RAID controller cards to make the 2 separate RAID0 configurations? Would anyone suggest what to look for in a RAID card, or recommend a card?

Any detailed feedback would be very helpful. Have my future system almost blue printed, with the exception of the drive systems.

Thank you,
Jeff

i am sure by now you have completed you build.. but for future reference.

OS drive (never raided bad news and pointless)
2 drives raid 0 capture/media etc
2 drives raid 0 export/render.
(you never want to read and write from the same drive array unless doing a large 8 or more drive raid 5,6)

something for external back up.

as far as drive failure, raid failure etc..

WD/Seagate etc can all fail. both are great drives. raid arrays do not require Enterprise drives when in 0
raid 3.5.6 need enterprise drives.
yeah you can get away with not using them but drop out rate will increase without them in a parity raid.

Scott
ADK

[Steve Kalle]

I want to add a very important point: if you have clients sitting with you during editing, then you should NEVER use Raid 0 - its just not worth the risk.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

I want to add a very important point: if you have clients sitting with you during editing, then you should NEVER use Raid 0 - its just not worth the risk.

RAID 0 does work well as a media cache/preview/pagefile drive. That much I'd give.

Otherwise, if a RAID array is required because a single drive is too slow or for whatever miscellaneous reason, you're better off spending the $500 or so for an 8-port PCI-e RAID card plus the cost of whichever additional drives that are required.

I stated the above because of my experience with Seagate and Samsung 7200 rpm hard drives. Although none of the drives currently active failed, the 1TB 7200.12 is actually slower - sequential-speed-wise - than even a 5900 rpm 2TB Green (the newest SATA 6 Gbps revision with 64MB cache) of the same brand. And the Samsung F3 1TB worked no better than the 7200.12 in RAID 0 despite the F3's 15 MB/s higher sequential transfer speed than the 7200.12. In this instance, both models of drives - particularly the Samsung F3 - are limited by the cache performance.

[Scott Chichelli]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

I want to add a very important point: if you have clients sitting with you during editing, then you should NEVER use Raid 0 - its just not worth the risk.

thats a rather silly statement dont you think?
99% of the time you get a warning that a drive is failing.
the majority of systems i ship are set up with 2x 2 drive raid 0.
rarely does a client have a failure/data loss.

Scott
ADK

[Scott Chichelli]

Originally Posted by Randall Leong

.

Otherwise, if a RAID array is required because a single drive is too slow or for whatever miscellaneous reason, you're better off spending the $500 or so for an 8-port PCI-e RAID card plus the cost of whichever additional drives that are required.

ideally a raid 5,6 is nice but overkill for most peoples needs and budget.
an easy statement to make when its not your $.

[quote]
I stated the above because of my experience with Seagate and Samsung 7200 rpm hard drives. Although none of the drives currently active failed, the 1TB 7200.12 is actually slower - sequential-speed-wise - than even a 5900 rpm 2TB Green (the newest SATA 6 Gbps revision with 64MB cache) of the same brand. QUOTE]

something is definately not right there..
the Seagate 12 with 32meg cache is faster then the green drives with 64.
what are you using to test with...
also Sata 300 vs 600 bears little fruit until you get up into the higher end raids..

raid 0 should be 80% plus more thruput than standard
some recent #s

WD 1 TB 64 meg Cache Sata 600 Drives
Intel onboard Controller
Single drive - 112MB
2 Drive Raid 0 - 196MB
4 Drive raid 0 - 364MB
3 Drive Raid 5 - 108MB
4 Drive Raid 5 - 296MB
Marvell 6G controller
Single Drive - 111MB
2 Drive Raid 0 - 215MB

Intel SAS RS2BL080 8 Port controller with 512 DDR2 Ram.
Single Drive - 111MB
2 Drive Raid 0 - 215MB
4 Drive Rqaid 0 - 429MB
3 Drive Raid 5 - 219MB
4 Drive Raid 5 - 315MB

Seagate 1TB 32 Meg Cache Drives
Onboard Intel Controller
Single Drive - 103MB
2 Drive Raid 0 - 206MB
4 Drive Raid 0 - 395MB
3 Drive Raid 5 - 202MB
4 Drive Raid 5 - 299MB

Scott
ADK

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Scott Chichelli

ideally a raid 5,6 is nice but overkill for most peoples needs and budget.
an easy statement to make when its not your $.

something is definately not right there..
the Seagate 12 with 32meg cache is faster then the green drives with 64.
what are you using to test with...
also Sata 300 vs 600 bears little fruit until you get up into the higher end raids..

raid 0 should be 80% plus more thruput than standard
some recent #s

WD 1 TB 64 meg Cache Sata 600 Drives
Intel onboard Controller
Single drive - 112MB
2 Drive Raid 0 - 196MB
4 Drive raid 0 - 364MB
3 Drive Raid 5 - 108MB
4 Drive Raid 5 - 296MB
Marvell 6G controller
Single Drive - 111MB
2 Drive Raid 0 - 215MB

Intel SAS RS2BL080 8 Port controller with 512 DDR2 Ram.
Single Drive - 111MB
2 Drive Raid 0 - 215MB
4 Drive Rqaid 0 - 429MB
3 Drive Raid 5 - 219MB
4 Drive Raid 5 - 315MB

Seagate 1TB 32 Meg Cache Drives
Onboard Intel Controller
Single Drive - 103MB
2 Drive Raid 0 - 206MB
4 Drive Raid 0 - 395MB
3 Drive Raid 5 - 202MB
4 Drive Raid 5 - 299MB

Scott
ADK

Actually, I got an average transfer rate of 108 MB/s with the 5900 rpm drive (and that drive is an external USB 3.0 drive kit that's connected to the onboard USB 3.0 controller on my system's motherboard, to boot). But the average transfer rate of my particular 7200.12 barely touches 100 MB/s (and that is on the primary Intel ICH10R SATA controller on the motherboard). Trust me, I benchmarked each of the drives individually. Something is fishy with my particular drives, especially since my Samsung F3s average close to 115 MB/s on that same Intel ICH. The only thing that's slower on the 5900 rpm Green drive than on my 7200.12 is the random access speed: It took 19 ms on the Green, versus 14 ms on the 7200.12.

By the way, your results clearly showed that the 1TB WD Black SATA 6 Gbps drives do not work as well as the Seagate 7200.12 drives in a RAID array using the onboard Intel ICH10R controller.

UPDATE: I have tested two Samsung 1TB F3 drives in RAID 0 connected to my system's onboard Intel ICH10R controller. My result: 222 MB/s average. However, it provided no real-world performance increase over two Seagate 7200.12 drives due to the differences in the caching alogarithms in the two models of drives.

[Steve Kalle]

Originally Posted by Scott Chichelli

thats a rather silly statement dont you think?
99% of the time you get a warning that a drive is failing.
the majority of systems i ship are set up with 2x 2 drive raid 0.
rarely does a client have a failure/data loss.

Scott
ADK

Out of 6 failed Raptors & Velociraptors, NONE of them gave a warning unless you consider your computer freezing and upon hard reboot, you see that a drive is designated dead. Furthermore, 99% of people here who use Raid 0, use the onboard Raid controller (ie Intel ICH) and that doesn't provide any sort of warning for anything until a drive is dead.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

Out of 6 failed Raptors & Velociraptors, NONE of them gave a warning unless you consider your computer freezing and upon hard reboot, you see that a drive is designated dead. Furthermore, 99% of people here who use Raid 0, use the onboard Raid controller (ie Intel ICH) and that doesn't provide any sort of warning for anything until a drive is dead.

Actually, the ICH gives you no warning until the next reboot - and that's when I found out that one of the three Seagate 7200.12 drives was close to early failure. The reboot indicated the array containing the failing drive as "degraded".

[Tim Polster]

I think the way to "see" these RAID 0 setups is as one drive and to view them as temporary storage.

I do not put anything on a RAID 0 drive (or any drive for that matter) that is not already backed up somewhere. Redundant systems help you sleep at night as well as save your butt at times. Hot swap trays are better than sliced bread.

I think the quality control for all of the drives on the market has fallen short of a lot of folk's expectations.

The idea of mini-RAIDs can really speed up workflow. Writing, encoding or building images from RAID to RAID is about the fastest way to work.

I just did some testing with Adobe Media Encoder CS5 as well Encore CS5 and the output speed of working from a source file on a RAID 0 compared to a single drive is a lot faster.

[Scott Chichelli]

+1
raid 0 sets are the ideal way to work

even on a raid 5,6 one is very foolish to not back up..

every drive i have had fail has let me know in some way. errors/noise pop up from intel raid matrix.
i did have one lose its MBR however out of the blue due to a bad ext firewire controller.
which was my back up oddly..
now i use raid 5 NAS. and even its backed up to a 2tb eSata :-)


Scott
ADK

[Steve Kalle]

Originally Posted by Scott Chichelli

+1
raid 0 sets are the ideal way to work

If you want to risk losing hours of work and then hours of reloading data or losing valuable face time with a client because you must stop working.

Another issue that can pop up and cause data loss is a Sata cable or Sata port going bad which happened to a client of mine a few weeks ago. Because I setup his PC with Raid 10 (using Intel ICH10r), he had no data loss and no downtime due to a bad sata port.

For most people here editing XDCAM, HDV and H264, a single drive is good enough and a 2 drive Raid 1 is even better because you still get an increase in read speed and read access times.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

For most people here editing XDCAM, HDV and H264, a single drive is good enough and a 2 drive Raid 1 is even better because you still get an increase in read speed and read access times.

Only if the drives are using a full-duplex interface such as SCSI and SAS and connected to the appropriate SCSI or SAS controller. SATA, on the other hand, is only a half-duplex interface - which means that data can travel in only one direction at a time (a single SATA device cannot read and write simultaneously because the interface and host controller would not allow it to happen). The half-duplex nature of (S)ATA can slow down disk performance so much that today's fastest hard drives would become effectively as slow as the maximum practical transfer speed of a five-year-old drive in sequential transfers. That is why I'd recommend a minimum of three hard drives even if one is not using a RAID.

[Scott Chichelli]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

If you want to risk losing hours of work and then hours of reloading data or losing valuable face time with a client because you must stop working.

Another issue that can pop up and cause data loss is a Sata cable or Sata port going bad which happened to a client of mine a few weeks ago. Because I setup his PC with Raid 10 (using Intel ICH10r), he had no data loss and no downtime due to a bad sata port.

For most people here editing XDCAM, HDV and H264, a single drive is good enough and a 2 drive Raid 1 is even better because you still get an increase in read speed and read access times.

hey if thats the way you feel by all means..
but its not what i recoomend or sell.. nor is your experiance the norm. we rarely have a client with data loss or raid 0 dying.
while raid 5,6 is the best way not everyone can afford it or wants to.
i have a hard enough time convincing them they need a back up plan at times.

FYI raid 1/10 i refuse to sell or support. take about thinking your butt is covered only to find out when you try to rebuild the array it fails... and talk about time? raid1 or 10 takes a good long time and you cant work whilst doing it..
you can copy over your back up vastly faster than trying to rebuild that array..

but yes DV/HDV has no need for raid arrays (amazed people are still using this)

XDcam/avchd/h264 can most certainly benefit from raid0 particularly when increased layers/effects

for many time is money. and the render time is what most people hate, this is the single biggest question i get! how can i decrease my render times..
raid 0 increases this regardless of what codec. (well when having 2 sets of balanced raid arrays)

Scott
ADK