To RAID or not to RAID

Erkan

Erkan

mr-walker.bandcamp
Jun 16, 2008
3,305
5
38
Uppsala, Sweden
mr-walker.bandcamp.com
Some of you may remember me mentioning that my system drive in the rehearsal room computer / "studio" computer will probably crash soonish. I was thinking about getting an SSD instead but it is still too early in my opinion, so I have a final decision to make before ordering some parts.

I already have a Western Digital 500gb in that computer which acts as storage right now. I'm thinking of buying another, and running them in RAID. Does anyone have any experience with RAID setups for audio production? Is it a big no no, is it risky? Or is it simply godlike and a must-have if possible?

My main concern is stability... and I've heard a few things about RAID setups so I don't want to risk anything. I can always mixdown some tracks together if I get too many of them in my projects, but I can't always recover from a big mother fuckin' hard drive crash.

Your tips?

Cheers dudes!
 
First things first mate, check if your motherboard has a RAID controller. If not, then you can forget this post hehe :D Secondly, hell yes! What you want is two drives in RAID 0 configuration (the whole fallover RAID config is a little overkill unless you're configing servers really). Thirdly, its time to stop being a girly man and do the RAID config with two SSD drives muhaha. The speed of just two of those in RAID is marvalous :p Fourthly I have to go tho the doctors for a swine flu test tomorrow :hotjump: Fifthly if you really cant afford SSDs, get some raptors or something, they have sick speed :)
 
I run RAID on my workstation. (ASUS on board Intel Storage Matrix RAID controller)

2 x 500GB in RAID1 for Projects+Samples
2 x 250GB in RAID1 for OS+Apps.

Works great. Gives me the ability to lose one drive and not miss a session, lose any files, or be forced to fuck around with my PC when I have work to do. I can order a replacement for the failed disk and replace it as soon as I get the new one in the post.
 
I've been using a RAID0 drive for audio work for about a month or so now. It can take ridiculous amounts of drum editing so much easier now. A ton of regions scattered everywhere from tracking, which cause the studio MacPro to shit itself just glide effortlessly over on my native DAWs.

For me it was worth it for the editing alone, but I don't imagine you'd see too much of a benefit beyond that, unless you commonly deal with in excess of 100 tracks per project.

I would also not use it as a storage drive. The data on the RAID drive should be regarded as transient and not vital. Your real backups need to be done elsewhere.
 
Guys, you're talking about completely different things! :OMG:

There's RAID 0 (striping).
Pro: Speed advantage over 1 drive, can use full capacity of both drives.
Con: IF ONLY ONE DRIVE OF THE TWO FAILS, ALL DATA IS LOST.

That's what Ermz and Kev were talking about. I'll say that again, the chance of data loss is doubled using that method.


Then there's RAID 1 (mirroring).
Pro: Security - if one drive should fails, you'll get a notification, but can continue working as normal.
Cons: Can use only the capacity of one drive.

That's what sysera was talking about.


Me, I'm using RAID 1 (mirroring) in my two computers used for audio work. I've had a hard drive crash on me a few years ago, so that's worth it for me. Never had a problem. If you're concerned about speed, I would strongly advise against RAID 0 and going for a faster drive instead. The speed advantage of RAID 1 is nothing against using the money that two drives would cost to buy one faster drive.
 
Erkan said:
I already have a Western Digital 500gb in that computer which acts as storage right now. I'm thinking of buying another, and running them in RAID.
Click to expand...

Keep in mind that ideally, two identical drives should be used. If the sizes are different, only the size of the smaller one will be used. If one is faster than the other, the slower one dictates the speed mostly. I always bought my RAID drives together, from the same batch.

If you're still interested in SSD's, I can recommend this article and the follow-ups to keep you getting some of the cheap and useless crap that's out there.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=31
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/
 
Psych05 said:
Keep in mind that ideally, two identical drives should be used. If the sizes are different, only the size of the smaller one will be used. If one is faster than the other, the slower one dictates the speed mostly. I always bought my RAID drives together, from the same batch.[/url]
Click to expand...

While I agree you want to find two drives of identical size for these reasons, I would heavily warn against getting two of the exact same drive from the same manufacturer, and warn even more heavily against the same batch of drives.

If hard drive vendor X manufacturers 5,000 instances of drive Z, and the batch 0-2500 all have a similar fault, this will increase the likelihood of BOTH drives failing in your RAID 1 group within a short period of time.

Now it's rare to see this happen, but I've seen it happen many times over the years and buying the exact same drive to be the secondary in your RAID 1 configuration isn't the best idea.

I would recommend getting two drives of identical size from two different manufacturers and make sure the speed of either drive is acceptable to you, should your RAID speed be dictated by the slowest one of the two.

Just look at the manufacturers web page and data sheet for both drives you are interested in, and make sure the "Sectors" number is nearly identical. Most 500GB drives for example from two different manufacturers these days will be identical, size wise.
 
Psych05 said:
Guys, you're talking about completely different things! :OMG:

There's RAID 0 (striping).
Pro: Speed advantage over 1 drive, can use full capacity of both drives.
Con: IF ONLY ONE DRIVE OF THE TWO FAILS, ALL DATA IS LOST.

That's what Ermz and Kev were talking about. I'll say that again, the chance of data loss is doubled using that method.


Then there's RAID 1 (mirroring).
Pro: Security - if one drive should fails, you'll get a notification, but can continue working as normal.
Cons: Can use only the capacity of one drive.

That's what sysera was talking about.


Me, I'm using RAID 1 (mirroring) in my two computers used for audio work. I've had a hard drive crash on me a few years ago, so that's worth it for me. Never had a problem. If you're concerned about speed, I would strongly advise against RAID 0 and going for a faster drive instead. The speed advantage of RAID 1 is nothing against using the money that two drives would cost to buy one faster drive.
Click to expand...

Oh, thanks a lot for the info man! I really didn't know about those pros and cons. It does indeed sound like I should just go for a really really fast drive instead. My head just cleared up a bunch now, thanks again :)
 
I'm running in RAID 0 right now, with (2) 250gb drives, which the computer splits data between the 2 drives, thus being quicker.

Down side, as said above, one drive craps out your F'd.

This is why i got an external HD that is 500gb that i backup to nightly. I figure under the setup i have now that's the safest option...

In an ideal world i would want to run 4 drives at RAID 1, one for current working sessions, and one for the OS and applications, as Sysra said above.
 
I had a RAID0 array go down once, really F***ed everything up. One drive was totally dead but the other was fine.

Ermz is right, if you are considering a RAID0 setup be sure to do backups all the time.

If you are genuinely worried about the security of your projects, ie you don't want to go through the hassle of doing regular backups and saving to multiple locations, RAID1 is probably your best bet. If not, the extra drive would be better used for extra storage IMO. Then again drives are so cheap these days there's no reason you can't do both.

Or even get a pair of fast drives (like Raptors or something) in RAID0 for the write speed benefits and then run a pair of bigger drives in RAID1 for extra secure storage.
 
i used to run 2 drives in RAID 0 when i had a PC.

then 1 failed. that sucked. lost a lot, but ahh well.

no-one has mentioned RAID 5, which is RAID 0 with parity. you run 3 identical drives (you should never use different drives in a RAID setup, the exception being JBOD), drives 1 and 2 run in RAID 0, and the 3rd drive keeps the parity. one drive can fail, but you don't lose anything. you add in another identical drive, and the RAID controller should rebuild the array. not quite as fast as RAID 0.

or there's RAID 10 (sometimes called RAID 1+0), which is.. well, 2 sets of RAID 0 drives. 1 drive can can fail (even 2), and you keep all your data, only marginally slower than raid 0.

overall, even though i've had data lost to a bad hard drive, the chances of a RAID 0 setup going bad are.. low. my drive had a specific fault, which was common in that revision, so i should of been more careful, but oh well. you usually get some indication of RAID health from your controller.

however, RAID'ing normal hard drives will never be as "responsive" as an SSD. you really need to use one to appreciate just how awesome they are!

thanks,
 
You'll love it until 1 drive goes south on you. Funny thing is, the only time I've ever had drives fail on me is when they are in RAID configuration! Its happened twice to me and I'm not going to try it again.
 
Splat88 said:
You'll love it until 1 drive goes south on you. Funny thing is, the only time I've ever had drives fail on me is when they are in RAID configuration! Its happened twice to me and I'm not going to try it again.
Click to expand...

Ouch that stinks :(

Yeah, I'll probably stay away from RAID configuration as well... I'm willing to bounce some tracks and stuff when I get too much hard drive action going on, it's no big problem. Guess I'll pick up a new drive and replace the system drive so I'm good for another couple of years, then switch over to SSD when they become the new standard.
 
Theory says that in mirroring mode writing to disks could be slower because you are writing twice as much and reading could be faster because you can split the reading of successive data between disks. You can minimize write penalty and maximize reading benefits by having two raid controlers that implement interleaved reading.

Not to long ago a 500gn hd died on me so now I have two 500gb drives in paranoid mode (RAID1 :)).
 
Splat88 said:
You'll love it until 1 drive goes south on you. Funny thing is, the only time I've ever had drives fail on me is when they are in RAID configuration! Its happened twice to me and I'm not going to try it again.
Click to expand...

Thats what images and regular backups are for tho dude :) FWIW, i would only have the OS and program files on the array anyway, and have a seperate one for data.
 
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