Two 10000rpm HDs in Raid

[simonv]

Hi folks,

I'm considering building a PC for mixing a huge amount of tracks.
I was thinking of putting 2 10000rpm hard drives in raid for performance.

Do you think it would really be fast or would it just be a waste of money?

[DSD_Mastering]

I have a PT HD/4Accel system with 2 Raptors in RAID 0. I haven't run out of tracks yet, even at high-rez...
Raptors are cheap these days..

Regards,
Bruce

[T_R_S]

Are you using a MacPro or a G5?

[tuRnitUpsuM]

simonv


go for it! will be fast.

the price of the raptors nowadays....most will be heading that way soon anyhow. 7200 drives will become the norm in laptops and 10's in desktops.

there is a noise increase (slight one) depending how well the PC case is insolated. but since u mentioned u'll be building (im assuming from case up) ... some noise isolating material isn't all that troublesome to tuck inside...and can be picked up fairly cheaply...

10k drives in raid are a godsend for high to very-high track counts.

cheers

[tuRnitUpsuM]

back it up! too.

if budget would allow....4 raptors set up in a RAID 0 + 1 would be the fastest , safest way to go about high track counts and security. 2 in RAID 0 the other two in a RAID 1 configuration backing up the first two drives.

but a raid 0 for sure.... just make back-ups however u wish to do so...

[simonv]

Originally Posted by T_R_S

Are you using a MacPro or a G5?

no, it'll probably be a q6600 based pc on XP

[T_R_S]

Using Round Robin for audio track allocation across several drives works a lot better than RAID.
Also 15K SCSI will probably out perform SATA II 10K Raptor Drives.
One thing to consider as well Raptor drives are not really true 10K RPM drives. WD make the platters slightly smaller than regular drives.
Continuos through put on read and write are much better with SCSI as well.
The only thing you will gain is really will be lower disk buffer settings so that audio will play and record faster ie you will not get that 1 second or 2 second delay when you hit play on your DAW. You'll be able to use disk buffer setting os 0 instead of 2.

[tuRnitUpsuM]

T_R_S

Also 15K SCSI will probably out perform SATA II 10K Raptor Drives

in most areas certainly yes.... except in one Price/Performance.


230.00 - 260.00 retail for a 150GB raptor drive.
500.00 + retail for a 72 GB 15k drives.

[ImJohn]

I did a SAS + SATA combo setup and so far it seems to work well. I'm not running RAID, but if you are going to do RAID, you should get a full blown hardware RAID controller. 'Software RAID', the kind that comes with XP Pro etc, will work OK, but it's slower and not as reliable as hardware RAID. I tried software RAID with my last setup and while 3 10,000 RPM drives striped to RAID 0 gave me a handful more tracks that the system could handle, it didn't seem significant. (and I'm not doing any video yet. audio track counts rarely got over 100 and in retrospect it really wasn't nessesary (i was being a lazy musician! )

Anyway I'd suggest considering the following since you can create a very nice, fast, expandable and hot swapable SAS+SATA II JBOD/RAID system for about $1000 . . . (price can of course vary a lot depending on what you get, $1000 is approximate for a drive cage, controller, 2 73GB 15K rpm SAS drives and 2 500GB SATA II 7200 rpm drives as shown below):

One of these hot swappable drive cages for under $150:
Supermicro, Inc. - Products | Accessories | Mobile Rack | CSE-M35TQ

These LSI Logic 4 port SAS controllers are under $200 and PCIe:
MegaRAID SAS 8204ELP : MegaRAID SAS/SATA Entry Line : MegaRAID SAS/SATA : Internal RAID : Products : Storage : LSI
(I got this 8 port Adaptec one since my motherboard is PCI-X and i wasn't sure at first if i was going to use an internal drive cage or external: Adaptec - Adaptec Serial Attached SCSI 48300)

These Seagate 73GB SAS 15K.5 RPM 16MB Cache drives are only $194 each. Striped to RAID 0 I think they would eat just about anything you threw at them :
PROVANTAGE: Seagate ST373455SS 73GB Cheetah SAS 15K.5 RPM 16MB Cache 3.5 inch

These Seagate 7200.11 500GB 7200RPM SATA 32MB cashe drives are only $125 each damn reasonable for storage or OS etc:
Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

[T_R_S]

Originally Posted by tuRnitUpsuM

230.00 - 260.00 retail for a 150GB raptor drive.
500.00 + retail for a 72 GB 15k drives.

$500.00?? If your paying that you must live in Europe LOL!
more like under 200 I've seen then go for $100.00

Seagate Compaq 72GB 15K U3 Proliant SCSI Hard Drive - (eBay item 110193678387 end time Nov-21-07 15:41:03 PST)

[tuRnitUpsuM]

Hi T_R_S


that was just a figure of the highest ive seen them for... hence the retail after the pricing. I know they can be found much much cheaper than 500.

but i did notice on the example uve listed the evil word...Ebay.

hope that comes with a good warranty......because at that spindle speed...lots could go wrong.


cheers

[lukejs]

I had an older IDE drive, and had some problems with audio streaming from the hard drive. I saw where you could format the audio drive using 64 kbyte clusters instead of the default 4 kb size, and this really made a difference. With the new SATA II 300 Gbps hard drives formatted with 64 kb cluster sizes, woud you really need RAID 0 ? How many tracks of 96 khz audio could you run with a SATA II hardrive formated with the 64 kb cluster size ? For my use... if I could get 32 tracks at 96 khz , I'd be happy. Do we really need RAID 0 , or is it just for those running over 32 tracks ?

[tuRnitUpsuM]

lukejs

Do we really need RAID 0 , or is it just for those running over 32 tracks

RAID 0 helps with seek times.... and applys to any type/speed HDD hell even SSD. Its the old saying... two work better than one. Data is spread out over two drives instead of stacked into one. so is much closer to the quickest sectors of the drives... (closest to the heads). And does help even sessions under 32 tracks. although alot more miniscule than say a session over 70, over 90, etc.

hope that helps somewhat....ive been on a typing/coffee drinking binge. lol

cheers

[lukejs]

I just went over to check out the Seagate drives, and it says that the SATA II hard drives can give 100 MB per second sustained data transfer..... How many kilobytes per second is 24 bit , 96 khz audio ? It seems like the new SATA II drives should be enough for 32 tracks of 96 khz audio....no ?