Help- My Raid-0 is dropping frames!

DigitalOblivion wrote on 11/12/2003, 7:34 PM
I have a 120 gig S-ATA drive for my OS and two 120 S-ATA drives configured in a Raid-0 dedicated for video capture. I finally get around tonight to capture some footage with this set up and all I get were dropped frames! I change the capture drive to my primary OS hardrive and it captures fine. The only thing I can think of is the chunk size- when building the aray I chose 128k chunks which was labled as "performance". Could that be the problem?
I even went to Asus's website to update my Promise controlers drivers- still didn't make a difference. Anyone have any ideas?!

My system:
-Asus P4C800-E Delux
-P4 3.0 ghz
-1ghz Corsair PC3200 ram
-3 Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9 120gig drives (1 for os, the other 2 in Raid-0 for video storage)
-Windows XP sp1
-Vegas 4.0d

Comments

craftech wrote on 11/12/2003, 8:20 PM
The Raid Array is completely unneccessary and has been the root cause of many a problem in the past. Switch it back.

John
DigitalOblivion wrote on 11/12/2003, 8:35 PM
Granted it isn't "needed" but that's what I configured, yet you didn't offer any info? Why has it been a root of many problems? For you or for many others? Why? How, other than not using a Raid, can it be fixed? Heck...I'd be happy just to be cued into it's cause.
CrazyRussian wrote on 11/12/2003, 9:47 PM
RAID-0 has nothing to do with it, if it does then ti's very little. I had RAID-0 up until last week, and VV4 will drop frames and VV3 wont... captured to the same folder. Nobody from Sony/SF has made any attempt to request more info or troubleshoot it, at least not to my knowledge, and there were quite a fiew users posting about this. Go figure...

P.S. I had RAID-0 for many many many years... and it happened, last week, drive went bad :) good think i had more or less recent backup of my documents... video files are gone though....
Softcorps wrote on 11/12/2003, 9:48 PM
I'm pretty sure it is the chunk size as you suspect. I remember having a 4 disk SCSI Raid setup and I fell for the "larger chunk size is faster" ploy. It simply wasn't true. I went back to the default (32k?) chunk size and everything was speedy again.

Also, RAID is really unnecessary, in fact, probably not even desirable. Read my post in this thread: RAID setup for Video Editing

James
farss wrote on 11/13/2003, 1:36 AM
I had major problem with RAID 0 on PATA drives, twice Windoz just lost the plot and I couldn't get teh drives back on line so data was totally lost.

I'e since ditched the RAID 0 and still using the same drives and not a single glitch. After I got them back on line I did a surface scan and there were no defects so I have no real explanaition as to what the roor cause of the problem was.

But even without those issues that I had, firstly RAID 0 is doubling the risk, if one drive fails you've lost twice as much data. OK you might say so thats no different to having one drive of the same capacity. Well no it isn't because you've got twice the amount of components hence MTBF is halved.

Second issue is that RAID 0 as found in the mobo chipsets requires more work from Windoz. On disk speed test you'll get better figures but this isn't real world as far as video goes. You need all the CPU cycles you can get and with drives today they are not the bottleneck for NLEs at least in DV land.

SCSI RAID is a different matter, the CPU isn't involved. That's why high end systems use it.