Check the specs again for that motherboard (is it Gigabyte X58A-UDR3 or X58A-UD3R ??) - I'm fairly sure it's onboard SouthBridge 6 xSATA already supports RAID10

Thanks for the info John,

I will be using 4 SATA drives, WD 750 black.
The PCI Express 16 can be shared so an 8X adapter will work?
If my bulk storage means my video files, than yes. But performance is what I'm after.
I'm not sure what this means, concurrent maintenance and taking the array down for rebuilds?

thanks,
robert

Thanks ChristoC,

You're right, it is UD3R, which does support Raid 10. I was scouring the net for info, reading about lots of problems with drives falling out of the array, being reported as damaged, etc. Some suggested using a more reliable add on adapter instead. I'm hoping someone can offer feedback on their configuration.

thanks,
robert

Good RAID setups will let you remove a failing drive and replace it without taking the whole RAID offline.
TBH you'd probably do better asking questions on a forum dedicated to this topic if you're serious. Mobo RAID can be rather tragic although I have to say my RAID 0 setup on a GA mobo has been flawless. I'm only using the two SATA ports that rund off a dedicated RAID controller chip. I suspect once you go beyond that on a mobo you're going to be using the CPU to do a lot of the work which is not so good for video.

I'd also suggest that only 4 drives in RAID 10 might not be such a healthy setup. If you want a serious setup look to the SuperMicro cases, they can be had with the backplanes etc for SATA or SAS drives. Something like the following is what I've seen a lot of for high end video systems:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/747/SC747TG-R1400-SQ.cfm

Bob.

Thanks Bob,

Are you saying that 4 drives might not be healthy because of connections, or heat ? I'm not sure what backplanes are? I have multiple Corsair 800D's in my office. Also, all are water cooled by a central refrigeration system that I custom built. Cpu, ram, video and hdd's are all water cooled. I even plan to place a water block in place of the heat sink of the adapter card if necessary, as I hear they run pretty hot.
I'm hoping to get some feedback here, as video editing is exactly what I want it for, if it can deliver the high performance I hear about.
Would I get the same performance with Raid 0 compared to Raid 10 ?

thanks,
robert

"Are you saying that 4 drives might not be healthy because of connections, or heat "

The level of redundancy is reduced. 4 drives and 1 fails that's 25%, 8 drives, 1 fails that's 12.5%. Time to rebuild is reduced, risk of an uncorrectable read error during rebuild is lower. My understanding is that with RAID 5 or RAID 10 a larger number of smaller disks is more reliable than a smaller number of large disks.

" I'm not sure what backplanes are?"

In those Supermicro cases you can have a backplane inside the disk housing part of the case. The drives just slide into guides and connect to a backplane that has the power and data connectors. This avoids having to run a cable to each disk. If one goes wobbly you just open the front and pull the drive out and pop a new one in. I *think* that only works with SAS drives though.

"I'm hoping to get some feedback here, as video editing is exactly what I want it for, if it can deliver the high performance I hear about."

Fast disk arrays really only come into their own for uncompressed or lightly compressed codecs e.g. DPX sequences or 10 bit 4:2:2. For what most of us do the disk system is rarely the bottleneck. Also serious disk arrays for high end video and film work are very expensive, the money is arguably better spent on a faster CPU or RAM for what most of us here are doing. The only reason I have two SATA drives in RAID 0 is from time to time I used to handle Digital Betacam.

As I said before I'm no expert on any of this. If I was again to spend serious money on a system I'd use a good systems integrator. The one I used last time supplies most of the high end post houses here and they understand video and film.

Bob.

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your info, I guess I should just leave well enough alone, as it sounds like things might not work out as I would hope. I have no experience with raid arrays at the present. It sounds like Raid 0 is the most simple, does it give much better performance, or is it a recovery issue?

thanks,
robert

I think you also need to look at the type of media you are dealing with, and the render format, before assuming the HDDs will contribute to better performance.

I have the same OS and chip (i7-950) on an MSI motherboard, running Vegas Pro 10.0a, and I render to a Seagate external USB 2.0 drive. (This was intended as a temporary setup, but as you will see, I have no need to change). Watching the Win 7 performance monitor, my renders push the CPU to 98-99% utilization on all 8 threads. I have also rendered to a 7200 RPM eSata-connected HDD, with no difference. I interpret 98-99% CPU utilization to mean I am CPU-bound, and a speedier output disk will not shorten my render times.

Looking at the resource monitor during a render, the usage on the output drive far exceeds usage on the source and OS drives (two physically separate 7200 RPM internal HDDs). Also, I have never seen the system use more than 3.2 GB of my 12 GB RAM used.

A recent project used 21 tracks. At any one moment, I was rendering from 2 tracks of AVCHD 1080i from a Canon HF-S10, both tracks with event masks, chroma blur and key, and pan and crop applied, plus a track of 4288 pixel wide Nikon D90 jpgs, and varying numbers of text and audio and music tracks.

The project was rendered to MPG2 for DVD. If I were rendering for Blu Ray, the story might be significantly different.

I know this does not address backup as most RAIDs would.

Detailed specs:



Windows Version:7 64-bit
RAM:12 GB
Processor:3.06 (i7-950)
Video Card:Nvidia GT 430 1GB
Sound Card:SB Audigy
Video Capture:VIA 1394 (labeled LG super multi)
CD Burner:na
DVD Burner: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH24NS50
Camera:
Add. Comments:MSI x58a-gd65 mobo Adata DDR3 1600
1 HDD for OS, 1 HDD for source, USB 2.0 external for render output.

Hi dxdy,

So you're saying I could add a 3rd hdd to render to, and even that would be more efficient than my current setup of OS hdd and source hdd ? Presently I'm rendering to the drive that all my video storage is on.

thanks,
robert

"I will be using 4 SATA drives, WD 750 black"

You may want to double check that the WD drives are RAID enabled.... If you want WD you will need their more expensive RAID specific drives to avoid the drop offline problem. I'm using Hitachis in a RAID5 in one machine and Samsungs in a RAID10 in another with no problems at all.

Thanks bsuratt,

I haven't purchased any additional drives yet, thanks for the heads up.


robert

@rstrong:

The most repeated HDDadvice on this forum is to use AT LEAST 3 physical HDDs, one each for OS, source and output. The point I was trying to make in my earlier post was that even with a 950, even a USB 2.0 connected output drive (by far the busiest of the three) is still not the rendering bottleneck when rendering to MPG2 for DVD.

At one time I was going to install 10,000 RPM HDDs all the way around on my then-primary editing machine, a Q6600, but that would have been terrific overkill. Even 3 HDDs is likely overkill on that machine, likely OS and source files could have coexisted on one drive, athough partitioning the one drive into a smaller C and a larger D drive would have kept the OS backups to a minimum.

There are advantages to using a RAID card over the on board south bridge RAID, but I use both with my RAID 10 on a 3Ware 9650SE and it works worderfully. I also have a RAID 5 on the south bridge and have 2 back planes in a Gigabyte Poseyeden mid tower case (each has 3 drives) and another 3 Drives in the case drive bays.

The RAID 10 on a Card will be the fastest drive array you can get with redundancy, it will perform writes about has fast as RAID 0 and reads faster than RAID0 (it can read from all 4 drives at the same time). If you want more redundancy than RAID6 is the choice which will get let you drop 2 drives and have no problems. With a RAID card you often have the battery back up option (which is good a safety net incase of a power failure and using write caching)

As far as HDD choices, I have all WD Caviar Blacks on my RAID10 and no problems with no having the TLER (time limited error recovery) that the RE series drives have. You only have problems with dropping a drive and needing to build an array when you have disc sectors going bad and the drive is correcting the errors on it.

What ever route you go, make sure you back up your RAID array periodically on a single disc with enough room to cover your RAID - Arrays can get corrupted and you can lose all of your data. It hasn't ever happened to me but it can happen. I back up my RAID 10 to my RAID 5 and to the Single disk monthly or when I add a new data set to the system.

Hope this helps

Thanks to everyone for their input, much appreciated!

robert

I have tried 2 different integrated RAID controllers and neither worked. They caused disk failures or called a disk failed when it was not. These were nVidia and Intel chipsets.

I went to an Adaptec card. Costs more, uses a slot, but it's bulletproof.