Raid 0/1, external

Per1 wrote on 1/4/2008, 12:39 PM

Hi,

Anyone that can recommend how to best expand storage space.

I was thinking of an external cabinet like E-SATA. Anyone that have exp. of that? Does not have to be E-SATA, but would that not be the best compared to going "over" USB or FW?

Raid 0 / Raid 1 - what is best to use with Vegas?
Is not Raid 1 best as it speeds up reading and also have better fault tolerance? I guess that Reading is what Vegas do most, only writing when rendering or?

Thanks!

Comments

megabit wrote on 1/4/2008, 1:15 PM

Take 4 HDDs and create RAID10 - you'll have both speed and reliability.

As to the interface - I know from experience that FireWire (even 400)can sustain much higher speeds than USB 2.0

Myself, I'm thinking of yet another solution - connecting a RAID to my Gigabyte Ethernet switch with 802.11n, and make it available from my desktop via Gigabit Ethernet, and from the laptop via 802.11n; in the not so distance future also from any place on the Mother Earth.

Would be cool to offload the SxS cards via the laptop straight to the storage vault at home while shooting in India with my EX1 :)

MH_Stevens wrote on 1/4/2008, 1:39 PM

I'm looking at the 4 disk RAID10. How is it wired and what software needed? For speed don't you need a hard RAID controller?

rmack350 wrote on 1/4/2008, 1:39 PM

Well...

E-SATA generally has a bit more speed than USB or firewire, and I expect less risk to your expensive gear than firewire, so that's the way I'd lean.

If you want RAID, you can get eSATA enclosures with the RAID controller inside, and this will allow you to feed a modest array (2 disks) with just one eSATA cable. The advantage here is that there's less cpu overhead to run this array than there would be if you used an onboard RAID controller.

The general synopsis of RAID is that Raid 0 gets you speed and capacity without tolerance, Raid 1 gets you tolerance without speed or capacity, Raid 5 gives you tolerance with some speed and capacity but should be powered by a card that does its own processing, and Raid 10 gets you speed and tolerance without capacity.

Pick your poison. You might find that you don't even need the speed but would like to just be able to swap drives in and out for archiving. Raid usually ties you up for that.

USB and firewire have their advantages over an eSATA RAID box. First off, they're well supported if you need to take your drive to some other location. Second, because they can't quite match the speed of even a single SATA channel, there's no real reason to think about RAID enclosures, and this just makes everything much less complex. The extra potential of eSATA makes the purchasing decision harder.

Personally, if I am going to have a camera or deck on a firewire port then I'd prefer to keep other devices OFF of firewire. I've had one device go up in smoke and take everything else with it, so I don't plan on doing that again.

Rob Mack

rmack350 wrote on 1/4/2008, 1:44 PM

Good RAID controller cards will take the load off the CPU, leaving more power for renders. Also, a good card would support RAID 5, which should give you good performance and fault tolerance with three discs instead of 4, Or I think you could do Raid 5 with 4 discs and preserve more storage space than RAID 10 would give you.

All this said, I have read that Intel's Matrix RAID is very fast. Twice as fast as nVidia's onboard RAID.

Rob Mack

JohnnyRoy wrote on 1/4/2008, 3:41 PM

I've just been through this and I bought an AMS Venus T5 eSATA 5 disc encloser. It comes with it's own eSATA PCI Express 1x card, has an on-board processor for RAID and even comes with an eSATA cable, (everything you need to just plug and go) and can hold up to 5x 1TB drives as either JBOD, RAID 0,1 or 10. I just have two 1TB Western Digital WD10EACS drives as a JBOD for backup and it's working great. I have an internal 1TB internal RAID 0 (2x500GB) so the external drives are just backup and archive but I have 3 empty trays that I can configure as additional RAID's. It's really a well built enclosure that has two fans to keep your drive very cool.

~jr

Per1 wrote on 1/4/2008, 4:30 PM

As for mass storage - what would you guy recommend. Today I use external 320 GB Lacie drives but they all req. some very special power connection... Would be nice with some "casing" in the 5.25" slot on the PC which you really could hot-swap like a external FW or USB drive.
I've seen suchs bays(?) but also understood it's not that simple as just to rip the drive out and plug in a new, but that one have to unmount(?) them in the OS or similar.
Any on-hands experience of such systems.
It would be good to just have to swap the drive itself and not have to bother with external power etc. that seems to change for each months and model

rmack350 wrote on 1/4/2008, 5:22 PM

Yes. I have a product similar to JohnnyRoy's. It's an AMS Venus 3-tray insert that fits into two 5.25" bays. No Raid logic to it so it's a little simpler.

If your motherboard supports it you can hot swap drives in and out of this bay. You unmount it in the same way you unmount a USB drive, clisk the little "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the tray and select the drive to remove.

The two caveats are 1) it's not as quiet as I'd like and 2) I can't boot my computer with these drives powered up. If I do that, they aren't hot swappable. I have to power them up after the system is running.

You can install quieter fans in these things if you like.

The unit JohnnyRoy bought is tempting...

Rob Mack