What SATA RAID5 controller for video editing?

[dan_aka_jack]

Hi there,

I'm planning on building myself a 4-disk SATAII RAID5 setup for video editing. My main question is whether I need to spend loads of cash on a "dedicated" RAID card or whether modern dual-core CPUs can cope with calculating all the RAID5 parity data on their own?

I have found a handful of reviews on the web claiming that you really need a dedicated RAID card for RAID5... but all these reviews are a few years old.

Is anyone out there running a RAID5 array with a dual-core CPU and "non-accellerated" RAID card like the HighpointTech RocketRAID 2300?

Many thanks,
Jack

 

[dan_aka_jack]

Hi,

Thanks loads for the reply. Hmm - I hadn't considered using a mixture of RAID5 and RAID0! That's an interesting idea. RAID0 frightens me. A lot. (Even though I currently have a 2-disk RAID0 array!)

Thanks for those benchmarks. Is it reasonable to expect that multi-core CPUs will make "software RAID" a more respectable prospect? If you have, say, a 4-core CPU then you could dedicate one of those cores to RAID tasks and still have a very swift computer.

How do I do my video editing? Mostly I use Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and After Effects Pro 7.0. I'm currently using a Athlon XP64 running at 2.4GHz with 3GB of RAM but I have an X2 arriving in the post today from OcUK. Most of my projects are still SD DV (3.7MB/sec) so they don't require huge read and write speeds (just reliability and fauly tollerance). About half my projects make use of uncompressed SD (~40MB/sec) and a small handful of my own little experiments are uncompressed HD and 2k (~200MB/sec!).

My little business is just starting to take off so I'm planning to build myself a 4-disk RAID5 array on my current computer and then - with luck - I'll be able to build myself a whole new workstation in about 6 months.

Jack

 

[dan_aka_jack]

2nd-hand PCI, ATA card

I've been looking around on "the yellow auction site" and I've found that I can pickup PCI / parallel-ATA RAID cards for very little money (dedicated RAID cards with on-board RAM and processor). These seem like a bit of a bargain, especially as pATA hard drives are still a few quid cheaper than their SATA equivalents. My main concern about getting a PCI card would be the 133MB/sec max transfer rate of the PCI 33MHz/32bit bus.

Am I right in thinking that a 4-drive RAID5 array on something like the Highpoint RocketRAID 2300 should achieve almost 200MB/sec when reading? In other words, would a 4-drive RAID5 array easily saturate the PCI bus during reading?

Hmm...

Thanks,
Jack