Anyone using a raid5 on their editing pc?
 

i was curious if anyone on here is using a raid 5 for storage on their editing machine?

matthew

They might. But it all depends on the reason for doing so. If you
want to know if it is good for you, you will have to talk a bit more
about your background, what you are doing and why you think
raid 5 might be interesting for you.

well i know its right for me because

#1. i'm doing two different documentaries and a short and i have a total of 50+ hours of footage between the three.

#2. i have a ton of 250 gig sata drives

#3. i have a good deal of expertise setting up raids at the office

i was just curious how many people were using raids.

i hadn't done an sata raid until now and i was pretty unhappy with the adaptec solutions.

i have had wonderful experiences with their scsi raids but their sata products suck.

i started with the 4 port card and that was fine, but i quickly outgrew it and moved on to the 8 port card and that is when the problems started.

i'm on a 1.5 week vacation right now but when i get back i'll have a 3ware hardware raid 5 card and a raid chassis waiting for me.

matthew

My 3ware raid card is in the mail also (9500-4lp). Should be here next week. Although I'm using it for a server, not my video editing machine.

For my editing machine I could not justify the expense of the RAID solution. The speed is not needed for capture. For renders the limiting factor is CPU speed not disk speed. My projects are not big enough to over flow my 250 GB drive.

For you, the RAID solution seems a no brainer. You could build a enormous drive using RAID 5. I would be very interested in how well this works for you. I would also like to hear how you think SATA RAID compares to SCSI RAID.

What type of RAID chassis did you get? Is it noisy?

Thanks,
Kent

I have a built in raid controller on my mother board and it just takes the computer longer to boot up is all. Other then that it works great

RAID 5 decreases performance a bit. Since it has to process a mathematica equation (easily said) everytime it writes to the disks. Raid 0 and Stripping provide the fastest rear/write, because it reads from several drives at the same time.

It also depends on the RAID card you use. At work we use the 5300 Raid controllers. These cards do all the work for the processor and memory. I wouldn't recomend using the Windows version of RAID 5 since it will use your processor for disk processing requests.

well i finally got my raid built. i had some stupid issues like the vendor sending the wrong card and then sending the wrong raid chassis...

so i wound up with the 3ware 9500 card with the multilane connection/cabling.

this is the key as far as i am concerned, dealing with any quantity of sata cable is a hassle and they just aren't designed very well in my experience.

i have the AIC case with 12 sata drive bays and it just has 3 connectors. each cable handles 4 drives.

it even has a separate drive led for each drive and the 3ware card has connectors for each of the 12 drives.

so far it is working really well.

the raid chassis is just for the drives, it is a 19 inch rack mount and the 3 cables for the drives go out the back and into the rack case for my computer. the computer is equally overkill, dual xeon 3.06

i have it all in a 13u apc rack next to my desk.

the rack contains the noise fairly well.

i know this is all overkill but i lost too much work to problems with the adaptec 2810 raid controller failing.

the 4 port adaptec card was flawless, the 8 port was garbage.

matthew

Working uncompressed on a raid-5 might be a hassle because of the performance decrease.

But if you don't work uncompressed then it won't be a problem. Personally, I'm working with Avid XPro with a Raid-0 Stripe of 4x200GB drives. I can get around 3-5 layers with CC without dropping any frames in RT. Other NLEs might use the hard drive speed differently, Avids use it for layering in RT aside from the CPU speed.

>i'm on a 1.5 week vacation right now but when i get back i'll >have a 3ware hardware raid 5 card and a raid chassis waiting for me.


A PCI card? If you want performance, get an nForce3 motherboard with four on-board ports, attached some SATA WD 72 GBYte Raptors and watch your disks scream. That is, of course, if you need that sort of speed. Glenn has been quite thorough with his testing an found that the greatest increase in speed was attained by increasing your CPU and main memory speeds.

>I wouldn't recomend using the Windows version of RAID 5 since it will use your processor for disk processing requests.

Software RAID is proving faster than what many PCI RAID cards can offer. So, if the card is slowing you down, use the processor.
I know this is hard to fathom because we are all accustomed to hardware acceleration. It's time for some faster RAID hardware.

C'mon people you know you want a quad opteron board :D (Too bad not every NLE can fully take advantage of quad opterons.)

3- For video, the fault tolerant levels of RAID (1, 3, 5, 1+0) don't make too much sense when you can recapture from your source tapes. Just back up your project files often- a program like Dantz Retrospect should be able to back stuff up to a network drive.

<<<-- Originally posted by Gints Klimanis : >i'm on a 1.5 week vacation right now but when i get back i'll >have a 3ware hardware raid 5 card and a raid chassis waiting for me.

A PCI card? If you want performance, get an nForce3 motherboard with four on-board ports, attached some SATA WD 72 GBYte Raptors and watch your disks scream. That is, of course, if you need that sort of speed. Glenn has been quite thorough with his testing an found that the greatest increase in speed was attained by increasing your CPU and main memory speeds. -->>>


Which board you using?

He's right, the nForce3 250gb boards are killer. SATA and lan and hardware firewall are all on the chipset makes for screaming fast.

Benchmarks over at Anandtech and other sites have the nVidia based chipsets dominating in raid performance by a pretty wide margin.