RAID. Tell a clueless fool what he needs on a video/photo editing system

pilsburypie

pilsburypie

pilsburypie

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I have pretty much concluded my spec for my new PC. Price is rising at an alarming rate so I'm keen to nail the spec. So far I have settled on a ssd boot drive and a 3tb storage drive, but the several smaller drives in RAID configuration has just been suggested to me for speed and security if the 3tb fails. Obviously I have an external backup drive invade the worst happens.

So what RAID configuration is best for my needs, and what size drives? Any HDDs better than others?

Here is the spec so far with the single 3tb

Corsair obsidian 550d black
Asus P8Z77 V
Intel i7 3770K o/c 4.4ghz
Phanteks PH-TC14PE cooler
16Gb (4x4) Samsung Green MV-3V4G3D/US o/c 2400mhz
650w Corsair TX series
128Gb Crucial M4 SSD
GTX 570 GPU
3TB Seagate Baracuda 7200rpm
LGBH10LS38 blu-ray RW
Windows 7 pro 64 bit
*
 
How much money are you willing to pay and how many drives can your case take?

Could run a RAID-5 array + hotspare with a decent RAID controller, but the controller itself will set you back a few hundred.

Personally i would just go with 2x decent 1Tb or 2Tb 7200RPM drives in RAID-0 using the Intel RAID controller and have an external backup. It will be more than fast enough for general video/photo editing.
 
Rossi~ I'm sure you are right in what you say, only I don't really understand it!

What I do understand is my build is spiralling out of control so the second RAID-0 setup sounds more appealing!

Care to explain further? What is RAID-0? How does it work? What data is stored/written/read from where? Does the PC read/write automatically to what it sees as best? How easy is it to set up/maintain?

From the questions I have asked you must understand you are talking to a dumbo!
 
RAID-0 is basically using 2+ drives as 1. Data blocks are split between the drives giving higher bandwidth, better access and read speeds. The disadvantages of this is that if just 1 of the drive fails, you lose everything.

In fact, (just deleted a paragraph as you may as well read this rather than me typing a load out) just read this, your options are pretty much RAID-0, RAID-1 (no performance gain), RAID-5, RAID-6 (probably wouldn't bother with such little amount of data and drives) and RAID-10 (combination of RAID-1 and RAID-0).
http://www.techwarelabs.com/guides/misc_mod/raid_explained/
 
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Raid 0 uses both disks (or more) as one. Its faster that is all. For redundancy (so you don't lose anything) you would need raid 1 or as been suggested raid 5
 
Right, that makes sense. I can see how RAID-0 would be faster.... theoretically twice as fast but is it practically twice as fast? I can see how this would be useful as speed is the main aim of my machine. But, do you think if I had just one big drive this would be a bottle neck in the speed of the PC?

I can also see how I am near doubling the risk of loosing data due to drive failure, hence the suggestion of RAID-1, the mirrored drive. If I was using a RAID-0 setup with 2 HDDs, would I therefore need a further 2 drives as the RAID-1? If I were to have 2 HDDs in RAID-0 config and just 1 drive as RAID-1, wouldn't that bottleneck write speeds as it has to wait for the single RAID-1 to catch up?

The explanations you have provided have really cleared things up. I shall be an expert in no time!:rolleyes:
 
pilsburypie said:
Right, that makes sense. I can see how RAID-0 would be faster.... theoretically twice as fast but is it practically twice as fast? I can see how this would be useful as speed is the main aim of my machine. But, do you think if I had just one big drive this would be a bottle neck in the speed of the PC?

I can also see how I am near doubling the risk of loosing data due to drive failure, hence the suggestion of RAID-1, the mirrored drive. If I was using a RAID-0 setup with 2 HDDs, would I therefore need a further 2 drives as the RAID-1? If I were to have 2 HDDs in RAID-0 config and just 1 drive as RAID-1, wouldn't that bottleneck write speeds as it has to wait for the single RAID-1 to catch up?

The explanations you have provided have really cleared things up. I shall be an expert in no time!:rolleyes:
Click to expand...

In benchmarks it's actually almost twice as fast in sequential tests, but realistically have more of a 1.5 times figure in your mind.
No it will not bottleneck the PC, but the more disks you have, the faster the array and there's only so much the SATA controller can take (but we're talking like 5+ drives there).
If you want RAID-1 and RAID-0 you'll being going for RAID-10 and need an even number of drives and i would advise getting a dedicated PCI-E RAID controller for it to get the most out of it. For onboard Intel controllers i would advise using either RAID-0 for speed with an external E-SATA drive for backup or RAID-1 for redundancy with an external E-SATA drive for backup.

"Why an external backup drive when running RAID-1?" you say?
Never see RAID as any form of backup, it isn't. All the redundancy is there for is to make life easy if/when a drive fails, you can replace the drive without restoring data and it allows you to restore the data quicker. But what happens when the drives get fried, PC sets on fire, water damage, PC gets dropped or knocked over and takes out more than 1 of the drives?

Always have a dedicated backup that isn't in the PC, preferably not even stored in the room depending on how cautious you are.
 
Thanks Rossi~

RAID-10 looks like a step too far for me with even numbers of drives and a dedicated RAID controller.

RAID 0 looks like a sensible speed increase using my external HDD as a backup.

Just a couple more questions, firstly to clarify what I have already asked and you have answerd. I asked if I just had 1 big HDD, would the read/write speed be a bottleneck in the speed of my PC? (with video editing/rendering in mind). You said it wouldn't. So what's the point in going for RAID-0? Why bother with faster read/write times of RAID-0 if the single HDD is fast enough to not be the limiting factor in the PC's speed?

Are there any particular HDDs that work well in RAID-0 config? Or are they all much of a muchness. Was thinking of the Seagate Baracuda range perhaps 2 x 1TB

If say one of my RAID-0 drives failed, then the data on the other one will be useless as it would probably contain loads of pieces of file which have no other half so to speak..... So I buy another HDD - What do I have to do? Reformat/wipe the good original disk? How do I copy the files from my single external backup drive to the 2 RAID-0 discs? Does the PC just recognise them as one and automatically divide the data between the HDDs.

Same question as above really but for backing up. What does the PC call the RAID-0 drives? Does it call them c:\ and treat as one or does it give them 2 letters?.
 
No problem :)

pilsburypie said:
Thanks Rossi~

RAID-10 looks like a step too far for me with even numbers of drives and a dedicated RAID controller.

RAID 0 looks like a sensible speed increase using my external HDD as a backup.

Just a couple more questions, firstly to clarify what I have already asked and you have answerd. I asked if I just had 1 big HDD, would the read/write speed be a bottleneck in the speed of my PC? (with video editing/rendering in mind). You said it wouldn't. So what's the point in going for RAID-0? Why bother with faster read/write times of RAID-0 if the single HDD is fast enough to not be the limiting factor in the PC's speed?

Sorry i read the original question as "would RAID-0 bottleneck". But i see what you're asking and the answer is generally yes, yes a single hard drive would be a bottleneck but it depends how you look at it. SATA-II can provide much more bandwidth than a single hard drive can read/write let alone SATA-III (6GB/s). But it depends whether the function/application requires such speed, in the case of reading/writing videos and photos would strongly suggest getting a decent drive solution.

Are there any particular HDDs that work well in RAID-0 config? Or are they all much of a muchness. Was thinking of the Seagate Baracuda range perhaps 2 x 1TB

I use 2x WD Caviar Black 1TB drives, they're fast drives and have been perfectly reliable for the past 2 years in RAID-0. I can't comment on the Seagate drives since i've stuck with WD for years. I have heard that Samsung drives are pretty reliable.
Just make sure you pick identical drives (technically you could run different drives, but you may run into problems, so i would never recommend it) of at least 7200rpm and known for being reliable and you should be fine.

If say one of my RAID-0 drives failed, then the data on the other one will be useless as it would probably contain loads of pieces of file which have no other half so to speak..... So I buy another HDD - What do I have to do? Reformat/wipe the good original disk? How do I copy the files from my single external backup drive to the 2 RAID-0 discs? Does the PC just recognise them as one and automatically divide the data between the HDDs.

If one drives fails then yes you are correct, all data on the other drive is useless as it's only got parts of the data.
What you will need to do is replace that drive with the same model, re-create or 'initialise' the RAID-0 array and then physically copy the data back over from your backup.
When you create the RAID-0 array, this is done outside of the operating system. The operating system will just see the array as one hard drive.

Same question as above really but for backing up. What does the PC call the RAID-0 drives? Does it call them c:\ and treat as one or does it give them 2 letters?.

1 letter (so by default C:). The operating system cannot tell how many disks are in the array, only the Intel software/RAID programs can. See the screenshot below of my RAID-0 array (Disk 2 - Data).
Click to expand...



raidc.png
 
Rossi~ You are a scholar and a gent! Thankyou for taking the time (as have others) in explaining in painfully basic detail, which I desperately needed, the options available to me.

I think in conclusion a RAID-0 setup would be right up my street.;)
 
There are few home users who can make a reasonable case for using raid set ups. The crux of the issue is that a few minutes (or even hours) downtime rarely matters that much on a home computer. Raid 1 or 5 will survive a hard drive failing, and provided you replace the failed drive before another drive fails, the system keeps right on going. Servers benefit from this. The cost/return isn't quite there for home systems since so many other things can hurt your data and downtime doesn't matter very much.

Raid 0 is a performance effort. The chances of the array going bad are higher than for a single drive, and losing one drive costs you everything on the array. Raid 0 has been largely obsoleted by SSDs as the solid state drives are individually faster than a raid 0 of hard drives. If you can't afford enough SSD capacity then you're stuck with raid 0- but consider this. Do you really want 2TB of data at high risk of failure? Better to have 128gb or so of SSD as the working area instead and copy the stuff onto a hard drive when you're done with it.

Raid 1 doesn't make sense relative to a back up. It protects from a mechanical failure, but anything else that can hurt your data is cheerfully replicated across both drives. Accidental deletion is the main one. Better to use a single drive and backup everything to a second one each evening or week. A nice trick is to maintain the drives in exactly the same state, i.e. windows installed on both. That way if the primary drive dies, you can plug in the secondary and keep on going from wherever you were yesterday.

Raid 5 is more attractive than 1 or 0. The benefit is read performance more than redundancy though. Reading from 3 or 4 drives in raid 5 will consistently saturate a gigabit network, reading from a single drive wont. This makes a 4 drive network attached storage box quite attractive. It also physically isolates the video/photo system from your data. Working on files over the network in real time is likely to be high latency, but pushing a multi-gigabyte backup across the network when windows shuts down is quick enough.

I currently use a 128gb ssd and a 2tb nas. That works well. Previously this system had a 4 x 750gb disk raid 5, which worked well until the drives failed.

That's a very long winded way of saying that you probably don't want raid if you've got an ssd. If you want to store large amounts of data with a greater sense of security and faster read times, buying a HP microserver (as network attached storage) and running raid 5 is a very attractive option. I'll probably change to that later this summer, re-purposing the current NAS as off-site backup.
 
^ I agree with above. If the 128GB SSD is large enough to have Windows and the video files you're working on, edit from there and output to a normal hdd when finished. Backup to external drive as you planned.
 
accod said:
^ I agree with above. If the 128GB SSD is large enough to have Windows and the video files you're working on, edit from there and output to a normal hdd when finished. Backup to external drive as you planned.
Click to expand...

Agree too.
A 128gig ssd should be large enough. Mine is a paltry 60gig, and with Win7 64 and other bits installed, I've still got 27gig left to play with, so a 128 or more should do nicely.
This option would probably give you the best speed-per-squid ratio, and be simpler to set up.
 
Writing lots of data to SSD is still not advised and i'm not entirely sure that 128Gb would be enough surely for OS, Applications and full Video/Photo suites and dump space to use for temp data?
Either way, when you want to read and edit the work again are you suggesting to copy it back over to the SSD and work from there? Isn't that just a waste of time? If your happy with battering the SSD and moving data to and from drives then go ahead.

The quick and easy solution is just use the SSD for OS and applications, create a RAID-0 array of 2 decent 1Tb drives to store your data and work from just back it up and go from there. Much cheaper than getting a NAS/RAID-5 as this just a lot more expense, a waste for this use and over complicating things.
 
Writing lots of data to the ssd won't be a problem as long as it's sized right. Keep a decent chunk of the drive free and wear levelling will take care of it. Might mean having to go for a 256GB ssd but better to spend the money on that than a second hdd as the ssd will be faster than a raid 0 array.
 
Thanks for that in depth reply JonJ678. More ideas in the mix. A very interesting alternative.

Just to explore every opportunity, if I were to have that large storage HDD, would it be better to have a single 256gb ssd for OS and current working projects or 2 x 128 SSDs, 1 for OS and the other for work in progress?

More to think about for me which is what I'm after
 
2 ssds will be faster than 1 larger one as you can balance the io across them - os, progs and temp files on first drive, working project on second. Sometimes the smaller ssd's also have slower performance so you need to check that when looking into what drives to buy.
 
RAID-0, 2 x SSD's...... now wondering if I should just go with my original option of just a SSD for OS and programs and the 3TB drive for photo and video files......

Thing is I tend to edit a host of random photos so that really rules out having the most recent ones on the SSD and with video I make 1 year installments of my kids growing up which I edit as I get more footage. This would mean having a whole years worth of raw HD footage on a SSD which would probablytotal more than 128GB.....
 
I wouldn't recommend SSDs to use as Scratch Disks for video editing, for the following reasons:

- Video files are big, you need a good chunk of space.
- SSDs are expensive and offer very little space for the money.
- SSDs are superior at random reads, because they don't have to physically seek anything out on the hard drive. Video Editing though uses large sequential reads where it works its way through large video files while perhaps writing another file at the sametime. Its because of this that when working with video, the benefit of using SSDs as a Scratch Disk is not really as beneficial as their performance is for use as a System Disk.

I personally use traditional drives in RAID-0.
The only downside being as many have already told you is that you will loose everything on them if one drive fails. So if you go with that option, you just need to make sure you have a backup that you do regularly.

I've had one drive fail on me in a RAID-0 setup, but that was probably my own fault. I was using two drives by the same manufacturer and one that wasn't. One day I was cleaning and accidentally tripped the power on the computer while it was doing something. After that, the drive by the other manufacturer was dead.
 
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