2 drives or RAID?

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 10:18 am

I'm using SATA with a RAID option built into my motherboard. For doing music I wonder if it would be better or faster to use one drive for my OS and one for my audio or combine the 2 drives as a RAID level 0. I realize this would delete my drive. I would probably back up an image to CDs.

spoimala · Post by **spoimala** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 11:58 am

use two drives

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 3:21 pm

Forget it Brain... RAID it is made for something else, most particularly for server used and the like. It is not recomended for Audio stuff or DAW, keep it simple. There are too many bad experiencies about RAID. It is not yet as reliable as you may expect it to be.

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 5:56 pm

RAID has been around a very long time what are you talking about? You mean SATA RAID?

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Tue Nov 18, 2003 6:22 pm

Yes, you're right, I was talking about SATA I should have specified it, sorry. RAID nevertheless, I've read about here and there, it is not recomended for a DAW.

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Wed Nov 19, 2003 8:19 am

Why not? You might be thinking of SCSI RAID which can slow down the PCI bus.

Gordon Gekko · Post by **Gordon Gekko** » Wed Nov 19, 2003 8:55 am

raid0 will get you going faster. But the way it works implies that you have twice the chances of losing data because a single file data is written on both drives. So if you use it, make sure you have working backups

Post by **garyb** » Wed Nov 19, 2003 12:33 pm

why bother?an ide drive gives a very respectable track count.let's not be techie just for the hell of it!

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Wed Nov 19, 2003 3:28 pm

RAID level 1 gives you a backup for everything. RAID level 0 is faster with each drive you add. How much faster I do not know but I know it's possible to attain speeds faster than any single hard drive. This could be very important when editing digital video. You could preview your edits full screen rather than having to deal with a teeny tiny window.

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Wed Nov 19, 2003 5:30 pm

afaik commercial RAID servers use dedicated machines with a specially modified server OS (based on Linux ?), but are optimized for multi-user business storage demands (many transactions with relatively small chunks of data).
SCSI Raids were frequently used when video was encoded framewise, but then even high end drives were slower than todays standard units.
Since DVI streams compress a magnitude better I wouldn't expect a problem to play back a full-screen (with the proper decoder) from current drives.
If it doesn't work, then the source of the problem might be related to the architecture of the application providing the data.
I'm not a video pro, but that's my guess.

cheers, tom

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 4:58 pm

Yes but when you compress you get lossy quality. It's okay for DVD but certainly not good enough to make a film movie.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: braincell on 2003-11-21 16:58 ]</font>

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 6:33 pm

RAID0 might be okay for a dedicated data drive set which is frequently backed up (i.e. an audio or video streaming disk-set which is not used for OS/programs/etc), but it's quite different to use it as an OS and Audio setup, which is absolute insanity IMHO.

peace

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Fri Nov 21, 2003 10:23 pm

regarding 'lossy' quality due to image compression :
some time ago we received several high resolution, large scale prints from images at various compression rates to decide what rate should be used for archieve in future.

5 (experienced) people looked at the pics and all agreed: it's impossible to distinguish the original from the 50% reduced one

Btw at first we assumed there was an error and they only sent one version

Imho it will be very difficult to find analog video gear with a higher signal quality than DVI equipped cameras or DVDs deliver.

If you're talking about digitizing 35mm Hollywood movies you're probably right, but on computer generated films you can yield even higher compression ratios.

cheers, Tom

dehuszar · Post by **dehuszar** » Wed Nov 26, 2003 10:15 am

I've heard of RAID being used quite well for dedicated Giga machines, and stuff like that. Technically, you COULD use it for standard audio projects, and probably boost your track count, but for SFP you'd flood your PCI bus, and lose access to ASIO tracks and/or reverbs. RAID is great, but it's a bandwidth hog. More so than SCSI.

Sam

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Wed Nov 26, 2003 10:21 am

As I understand it SATA does not put a strain on the PCI.

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Wed Nov 26, 2003 11:20 am

It depends.. sometimes Intel-based boards have an intel controller which might be routed outside of the PCI bus, but otherwise it's just a chip which sits on the PCI as far as I know.

peace