Best Drives for RAID?

Mint_Sauce · 20 Sep 2007 at 14:38

Looking to build a big system with RAID being a big part of that. I was wondering what drives come out tops for RAID? Looking at 4x500gb or 4x750GB drives for graphics work/processing huge images.

I'm not too hot on RAID and drives so any information I'm really grateful for. I am thinking of the P35 mobo, good choice for RAID?

EDIT: Found these two drives:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...tid=14&subcat=

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showpr...tid=14&subcat=

Not sure which ones to go for.

Thanks, any replies appreciated!

rpstewart · 20 Sep 2007 at 15:16

What kind of processing are you looking to be doing that is making you consider that much space? Reason for asking is that you might be better off looking at multiple small arrays or just individual disks. If you only have one array in the PC then any simultaneous read/write operations aren't going to be particularly quick.

Have you considered how you're going to backup that much data?

Which P35 board are you looking at? P35 is the Intel chipset used on the board rather than a board in itself, usually it's paired with the ICH9R southbridge which provides 6 (I think) SATA ports all of which are RAID enabled. The RAID0/1/10 performance is good but the RAID5 support is very poor, reads will be fine but there's no hardware support for the parity calculations so writes will be about 15-20Mb/s.

Mint_Sauce · 20 Sep 2007 at 15:20

The processing is RAW files to TIFFs as well as stitching 24+ 16bit uncompressed TIFF files in to one big file. I wanted RAID as I know that's the fastest way to get Hard drives doing their thing. I'm not hot on RAID but think I would go for RAID - for the speed. I would back up all the RAW files to DVDs in case of a failure so although it's inconvenient I wouldn't be lost.

I was also considering using I think it's RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0 in which two hard drives are working as one and the other two are mirroring the first lot so I would keep the speed halve the overall capacity but at least be happy knowing the data is safe.

I believe this would be the best way to go and if I find i'm running short of space, put another 4 drives in an external RAID stack over gigabit ethernet.

I think...

As for the mobo, really not sure - the biggest thing is the RAID support and support for 4gb ram with the Q6600. Sound and everything else is not a concern. Overclocking ability is a huge bonus as I would like to push the system to get the most from it.

rpstewart · 20 Sep 2007 at 15:35

Sounds fairly sensible. RAW conversion doesn't place a huge strain on the HDDs but with a Q6600 you should be getting to the point where the time to write the TIFF is getting to be a fair percentage of the processing time, especially if you're talking 16bit files.

Just be aware that RAID 1+0 or 0+1 shouldn't be considered as giving you a backup, you will, as you mention, still have to backup to something else.

Not sure what the memory support on the P35 boards is like, I assume it's reasonable. I went with the older Intel BadAxe2 for my Q6600 because I needed the extra PCIe slots for the RAID controller. I wouldn't bother with anything more than 4Gb of RAM, I've got 8Gb at the moment and it's wasted to be honest. Even with Photoshop, Lightroom and Google Earth (with a huge cache) open I failed to use more than about 6Gb.

Mint_Sauce · 20 Sep 2007 at 15:58

Thanks rpstewart, 8gb sounds like fun but 4gb should be fine I hope like you say. I'll make sure to keep a backup of all the RAWS and go RAID 0 on all four drives. I've not had a hard drive fail in a good few years and will take the chance, the worst that will happen is half a daylost rebuilding so not too bad for the small chance of failure.

Mr Jack · 20 Sep 2007 at 16:09

Mint_Sauce said:
I was also considering using I think it's RAID 0+1 or RAID 1+0 in which two hard drives are working as one and the other two are mirroring the first lot so I would keep the speed halve the overall capacity but at least be happy knowing the data is safe.

Any reason to prefer that over RAID 5 or 6?

rpstewart · 20 Sep 2007 at 17:04

Mr Jack said:
Any reason to prefer that over RAID 5 or 6?

Cost. To get decent write performance from RAID5/6 you need a dedicated card with onboard XOR calculation support. You're looking at £100 or so for a cheap 4 port card which probably just be "accelerated software" RAID so still short of performance. To get anywhere close to the potential write speed of the drives you need to spend upwards of £300 on something like an Areca 1220. That then drives further expense because you need a board with a pair of 16x PCIe slots (assuming the GPU is in one).

marscay · 20 Sep 2007 at 22:59

the lane only needs to be 16x physical, the arecas work fine @ 4x electrical speed and this is plenty of bandwidth for most ppl.

the trouble with arecas is finding said motherboards which will work, not many enthausiast boards seem to work with them.

Mint_Sauce · 20 Sep 2007 at 23:42

What kind of speeds will I hit with the onboard raid controller on the Asus P5K Deluxe? I'm looking lustfully at your RAID speeds RPStewart although I notice you said you had a controller card which uses up two 16x PCIe slots.

Could mean a big rethink on my side if there's a considerable difference in speed/performance.

EDIT: Just read a review of the Areca 1220, I think it's a great Raid card but for Raid 0 I won't see benefits which match the price. Since i'm playing it risky the onboard controller should be ok and if I want to keep my data safe, go over to a Areca 1220 at a later date maybe?

rpstewart · 21 Sep 2007 at 08:36

Mint_Sauce said:
What kind of speeds will I hit with the onboard raid controller on the Asus P5K Deluxe? I'm looking lustfully at your RAID speeds RPStewart although I notice you said you had a controller card which uses up two 16x PCIe slots.

Could mean a big rethink on my side if there's a considerable difference in speed/performance.

EDIT: Just read a review of the Areca 1220, I think it's a great Raid card but for Raid 0 I won't see benefits which match the price. Since i'm playing it risky the onboard controller should be ok and if I want to keep my data safe, go over to a Areca 1220 at a later date maybe?

You're right, for RAID0 there's no point in going with an add in card. I'd only go with the Areca if you need RAID5/6 but remember you'll still need a backup plan, all RAID5 gives you is hardware redundancy.

On the 16x slot point, I probably wasn't all that clear. My controller is only PCIe 4x (although I too have half an eye on an Areca) but when I was looking for the new board there were very few Intel based boards with a spare PCIe 4x slot - unless I went for a 975 based one.

easyrider · 21 Sep 2007 at 08:39

Areca ...

How much is one of these?

rpstewart · 21 Sep 2007 at 08:43

Probably between £300 and £1000 depending on how many ports you want on it.

easyrider · 21 Sep 2007 at 09:16

rpstewart said:
Probably between £300 and £1000 depending on how many ports you want on it.

Guess Ill leave it then!

jbloggs · 21 Sep 2007 at 09:29

easyrider said:
Areca ...

How much is one of these?

Areca do PCI-X and PCI-E RAID cards, the cheapest PCI-X is the ARC-1110 which will set you back just over £200, and has 4 SATA posts (also offers RAID 6), the PCI-E ARC-1210, is also just over £200, also offers 4 posts, but no RAID 6, see Here and Here

Although the PCI-E is rated as PCI-E x8, it will work @ x1 and x4, and x16 in a PCI-E x16 rated slot, I have read of the ARC-1220 working perfectly well on a Gigabyte GA P35 DS3P in the 2nd x16 slot, which runs @ x4.