OT: Any RAID 0 users out there?

CDM wrote on 1/30/2004, 3:52 PM
I'm having a hell of a time using SATA RAID in my system. At first I thought it might be the onboard RAID controller on my ASUS P4PE mobo, but I went out and bought an Adaptec Serial ATA raid controller and I'm having the same problem. The problem is that when I record audio (even just mono 16bit 44.1 audio in Sound Forge) I get occasional little bumps or tics in the audio representing what looks to be a loss of data - the waveform just suddenly does a sharp dive or rise and shows a lack of continuity. It results in an audible bump. Has anyone else ever experienced this? I'm finding this very rediculou and frustrating that I should have ANY problem recording audio in a 2.53GHz system with a meg of ram and a freshly installed OS (WinXP Pro SP1).

Any advice would be appreciated. I'm ready to go back to standard ata 100, which I probably shouldn't have switched from in the first place since it wasn't broke. :-)

thanks in advance

Comments

Cold wrote on 1/30/2004, 7:37 PM
This sounds like an interupt conflict to me. What are you using for a video card? Have you tried switching slots? I've got 2 raid 0 array systems and both work fine at this point but I did have to do some card juggling with one of them as the raid card and my motu card were fighting it out. I'm not running sata though.
Steve S
farss wrote on 1/31/2004, 4:44 AM
Well I was running mobo RAID 0 on PATA and after two total losses of data gave it the flick. There's a big downside to RAID 0 in many cases, it chews up CPU cycles. Unlike hi end SCSI RAID controllers the drivers and hence CPU do a lot of the work from what I can determine. The disk access figures look great becuase it doesn't factor in CPU utilization, after all why would it, they're measuring disk performance.
rt1 wrote on 1/31/2004, 7:04 PM
Hey, I've got the same sort of problem. If you find an answer I would like to here about it...
PipelineAudio wrote on 2/1/2004, 1:22 AM
I just read about this exact problem, with a guy fixing it using powerstrip
PipelineAudio wrote on 2/1/2004, 1:24 AM
http://www.cakewalk.com/forum/tm.asp?m=45491
CDM wrote on 2/1/2004, 3:59 PM
Thanks Pipe!
This probelm just sickens me. I have wasted so much time on something so stupid. I should never have tried for a RAID config. I should have just stuck with what works. It's rediculous in this day and age that you can even put something in your computer that would prevent you from recording 44.1 16bit stereo without glitches.

arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg. I mean, It's clearly a technology that just doesn't work properly yet.
MacMoney wrote on 2/1/2004, 5:05 PM
Hi Charles
George and I had talked with Peter a few years back about RAID at NAMM. George went with SCSI-160 and I went with a RAID that I could never get to work that well. I'm now running SCSI-320 and 32-64 tracks without a glitch.

Tony Mac
CDM wrote on 2/1/2004, 7:52 PM
Scsi, huh? I was hoping to never have to touch scsi again. :-(

Well, I'm just switching back to regular old ata 100 internal drives.
farss wrote on 2/1/2004, 8:14 PM
IF you really need the bandwidth then SCSI is the go. If you don't need the bandwidth standard PATA is hard to beat.
RAID 0 in my opinion is simply doubling the risk of something going wrong or more to the point, when something does go wrong you loose twice as much data.
pwppch wrote on 2/1/2004, 8:25 PM
Back in those days a large - 80-120 gig - drive was VERY expensive. At that time I was using a Promise RAID set up that worked flawlessly for me. It provided 80 gig of storage using 20 gig drives.

Today, I have found no need for RAID as you can get a 40-80 gig driver for ~$100. Pick up a driver cartridge type system for another $40 and you can have all the cheap and swapable harddrives to meet your needs. A 20 gig harddrive is dirt cheap and should meet most audio project needs. With the driver caddies, you can swap them in and out. Some will even permit hot swapping.

Peter
tbobpage wrote on 2/2/2004, 8:14 AM
I've got the same ASUS mobo and running five total drives -- one set on RAID 0 array (because they were older drives with 2mb cache and they are faster that way), one on the ATA controlled and another on a promise ata100 TX2 PCI card, and another via firewire externally. I ran into soundcard hell this weekend when I put in the PCI card and resolved the issue via shuffling my soundcard (Delta44) around along with the PCI ATA card. Look into the IRQs in the device manager (view - by resource type - IRQ), disable anthing you don't use (like all those USB ports that you'll never use - keep the USB 2 port), etc, and then if still having problem, move things around some. I think I finally reached perfection with the ATA card in slot five and the wifi disabled and the sound card in slot two or three (I can check that out if needed for you). All that stuff on the cakewalk site noted above was a great discussion and interesting and all, but likely the PCI latency isn't going to be the heart of the issue for 99.9% of us -- it's probably an IRQ thing.

todd
bgc wrote on 2/2/2004, 10:03 AM
I'm running RAID 0 on an ASUS motherboard and it's flawless (and I love having the speed). Sorry for your problems.
bgc
RichMacDonald wrote on 2/2/2004, 2:41 PM
>I'm running RAID 0 on an ASUS motherboard and it's flawless (and I love having the speed). Sorry for your problems.

I'm running Sata RAID 0 on an MSI board and its flawless. Although I have done no audio like you're doing, so I can only comment on general performance, not latency and audio glitches. The general performance improvement is *huge*.

One sidebit: I had to go WinXP rather than Win2000. And I could not install the drivers on the ICH5R: I had to use the Promise connection instead.

Additional data, probably irrelevant to your problem. Best of luck.
CDM wrote on 2/3/2004, 6:48 AM
here's how I test this:
I record a sine wave into vegas or sound forge and while its recording I do pretty much anything else: scroll through a web page, open email, etc.
You might ask why I would be doing these things while I'm recording. Well, I do. I do lots of LONG recordings and I gotta be able to glance at my other stuff and this SHOULDN'T be a problem this day and age! It's not like I'm trying to record 30 tracks here.
bgc wrote on 2/3/2004, 10:07 AM
Charlesdem:
Sounds like there's a fundamental installation or configuration problem with your setup. The RAID 0 should be as solid as a single drive. Maybe contact tech support for the RAID controller company. I'm sure they'll have some insight.
You are right, this technology is ready for prime time but isn't always straightforward to get working correctly (the tech who built my system did some hair pulling to get my RAID system going).
B.
farss wrote on 2/3/2004, 3:13 PM
Ouch!
I wouldn't blame your troubles on RAID 0 entirely. Remember RAID can put MORE load on the CPU. Now your asking the CPU to run more threads and if you're using ASIO you've got very little buffering on the audio stream, I'd kind of expect something to give.