raid 0 pc set up

[Nate]

just picked up adobe creative suite and noticed they recommend using a raid 0 set up for handling hd video. just wanted to know what the performance increase over a simple sata hd vs. going raid 0.

from what i've gathered so far, a raid controller (hardware) is a must, but if you don't have a pci-x you probably won't get a lot outta a higher end card.

I have an asus p5n-e sli mobo which can run raid 0. I also believe it doesn't have a pci-x slot (two x8 and one x16). So would I be better just picking up two or three hard drives and running the raid set-up through the mobo or would it be quicker with a raid controller card? or would the speed be negligible and I should just pick up a decent sized single hd and save the cash?

[SenorKaffee]

On-board RAID can be a good cheap solution - you have to check if it is connected to a fast bus.

A PCIx-Card with its own controller is less stressful on the CPU and doesn´t rely on software to do its work. But in my opinion they are too expensive for the home user.

BTW, Windows 2000 and later versions can also create certain RAID-types without the need of additional hardware.

[mik]

with raid 0 you'll reach over 120MB/s. really no problems editing hd video or whatever. defragment often and it'll be even better.
the onboard raid 0 is just fine, little cpu usage. software raid is useless.

[Nate]

is there any advantage to running raid 5 vs. raid 0 or vice versa?

[mik]

it won't be as fast as 0 but it is failure tolerant.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel5-c.html

[Deep G]

My raid 0 set-up (on motherboard) hits 120MBs. The single drives alone reach 80MBs.
Important to set the stripe size to half that of your windows cluster size.
I found 32KB on the raid side and 64KB on the windows side works best for 2 drives in a raid 0. I had them both set to the same thing and could only top 96MBs.
Windows asks for 64KB and each drive delivers 32KB each. I don't know about larger raid 0 (4 disks etc.) or raid 5, just reporting what works well for me.

[Lunchbox]

RAID-5 has both fault tolerance and performance. There're lots of XOR calculations so a dedicated hardware would be better. The stroage capacity is n-1 which means, if you have 6 HDDs of 100GB each, you got a total of 500GB storage.

To really make good use of RAID-5, you would be benefit to have at least 4 identical HDDs. I think it doesn't worth setting up RAID-5 if you have only 3 HDDs.

Whenever there is any HDD failure in the array, unlike RAID-0, the whole array will still be functioning. You can swap a new HDD in to replaec the failed one. The RAID will rebuild itself.

[bluegrass]

On-board RAID can be a good cheap solution - you have to check if it is connected to a fast bus.

A PCIx-Card with its own controller is less stressful on the CPU and doesn´t rely on software to do its work. But in my opinion they are too expensive for the home user.

BTW, Windows 2000 and later versions can also create certain RAID-types without the need of additional hardware.

But for someone pluckin' down $1600 for an Adobe suite isn't going to be worried about the cost of a raid that will provide good speed. Boy I'm glad I'm not in the Adobe camp if it requires a raid to do NLE.

[Nate]

it costs me $600, student discount off journeyed.com....money kinda matters...kinda

[Lunchbox]

It costs me $0. I won at the Adobe Conference Premiere User group raffle drawing .. hehe

[jmacko]

As others have mentioned...

Although RAID 0 will give you the potential to read a file from both disks simultaneously....

You DOUBLE your chance of data loss. (If either disk goes bad, you are left with only half the bits needed to restore anything.)

If you're going down the RAID 0 route, I would HIGHLY recommend, you use it only for the project you are currently working on, and then move the data to another storage medium.

If you really care about your data, and want redundancy and performance, RAID 10 is the way to go. (Requires 4 hard disks, and most likely a hardware controller card.) But it has all of the RAID 0 performance benefits, with the benefit of a second copy of your data.

As for the software RAID naysayers, you can always add an additional hard disk to a software raid 5 array, to make up for the performance loss of going without a hardware card.

If I was you....

Go buy the following:

4 250GB drives - $60 each
1 RAID Card - $150

Set the above up as RAID 10. 500GB usable, with redundancy.

Set the above up as RAID 5 (you loose a bit of performance on writes, due to the parity calculation, but heck 80%+ of your disk IO is going to be reads.) and you get 750GB usable, with redundancy.

RAID 0 is asking for data loss, if you start storing things there for long term use.

[Lunchbox]

I'm running RAID-0 with 3 500GB harddrives. The performance is great! jmacko is right... I use it for current video projects. Even set Windows page file to that drive too. Since either one of the 3 drives die or misbehave, I will lose everything. I ran a backup program to backup to another machine every few hours in a day. So if something happen, worst case I lost work I've done in the past few hours. it won't be the end of the world.

I am willing to take the risk of HDD failure to gain performance.

[24Peter]

Guys - with all due respect, HDV (like DV) has a bit rate of 25mbps which is about 3.1MB per second. You don't need a RAID setup to handle even multiple streams of HDV video on the average machine. While there may be some benefits in terms of data redundancy in certain RAID setups, I don't think it's necessary for what most people are doing with the HV20.

[Lunchbox]

It depends on how complex the video you will are editing. I constantly work on multi-cam setup. Sometimes I have 4 video tracks doing pic-in-pic. If running all the clips from a single SATA drive, it chocks if I have transitions and filters applied to the clips.

I do agree for regular 1 or 2 tracks video editing, a single SATA drive will do the work. Still, it has to be a separate drive from the boot drive where the OS is sitting.

[Nate]

so lemme get this straight...

SATA RAID 0/1/0+1/5 is available through the motherboard

I currently have a max capacity of 4 internal hds, I currently have one internal 250gb with the OS and apps on. I also have a 100gb external with all my media files.

possible to even run raid 10 without running into trouble with my current drive running my os n stuff?

if I can't, run raid 5 - pick up three hds and run off either the mobo or a raid card?

[mik]

not that complicated. no need for a pci controller. just use the onboard.

use 2 hdds raid 0 for video editing and system's page file.
leave the OS on a non-raid drive so if the raid fails you won't have to install again windows. if you want the os installed on raid you have to either copy the sata raid drivers to a floppy and use the F6 option at install, or slipstream the drivers into the xp kit.

[Lunchbox]

Nate, not all mobo has raid-5 onboard. You have to check.

there're certain scenarios for your setup

Scenario 1
100GB for OS
2x250GB or 3x250GB running RAID-0. Make sure you have a backup strategy.
Total capacity = 100+500GB or 100+750GB

Scenario 2
4 x 250GB running RAID 0+1
total capacity available = 500GB

Scenario 3
4 x 250GB running RAID 5
total capacity available = 750GB

Scenario 4
100GB for OS
3x250GB running RAID-5
Total capacity : 100GB + 500GB = 600GB

[Noel]

[QUOTE=mik;10060]not that complicated. no need for a pci controller. just use the onboard.

use 2 hdds raid 0 for video editing and system's page file.
leave the OS on a non-raid drive so if the raid fails you won't have to install again windows. if you want the os installed on raid you have to either copy the sata raid drivers to a floppy and use the F6 option at install, or slipstream the drivers into the xp kit


2 questions. When you edit with RAID0, would you put the NLE software on the RAID0 HDD and not on the non-raid drive?
And also can you format the RAID0 drives. And how?
Newbie. Thanks for all the help

[Lunchbox]

The NLE software can be installed to your OS drive (e.g. C:\program files). make sure to set your temp file path or scratch disk path to the RAID drive for performance.

A RAID drive is transparent to the OS, which means, the OS will only see it as one harddrive. So you will use the same method to format your hdd just like a regular hdd. In XP, it would be the Disk Management in the System console in control panel.