SyncRAID

DVDoug wrote on 2/26/2004, 1:21 PM
This is a new IDE or SATA controller by NetCell (www.netcell.com) that is just coming on the market. It specs look like it would make a great addition for a video editing storage system with RAID 0 performance and RAID 5 reliability.

Has anyone heard of this or tried it?

Also if you were going to use a RAID system would you use it for the opertaing system as well as the data just like you do on a server or would you have a seperate boot drive and then the RAID sysetem just for storage?

Comments

RichMacDonald wrote on 2/26/2004, 3:01 PM
I'm not an expert on the subject, but this certainly looks interesting. Being able to do it with off-the-shelf hardware is a major plus. Another nail in the coffin for SCSI.

>Also if you were going to use a RAID system would you use it for the opertaing system as well as the data just like you do on a server or would you have a seperate boot drive and then the RAID sysetem just for storage?

Using RAID for the OS is a huge benefit for overall performance. I recently went to a RAID0 SATA setup (one RAID0 for both OS and data) and my computer (P4 3.0) went from slow to blazing -- I had been using a single 5400rpm drive for my OS. Simple things like Windows startup, launching apps, i.e., overall performance are *much* more pleasurable. I'm never going back. We've definitely reached a stage where hard drive performance is bottlenecking overall performance.

And the latest motherboards are now providing two-by-two SATA connections, i.e., you could use one pair of SATA RAID0 drives for your OS and another pair of SATA RAID0 drives for your data. And still have all 4 of your IDEs available. Note: I haven't tried this, so there may be additional issues in practice; all I know is that the motherboards have the slots available.
DVDoug wrote on 2/26/2004, 3:22 PM
What also interests me in this is that it is not set up as RAID 0 system but uses one drive as a parity so that you can have one drive fail and not lose anything.

Although I am only using it to do home movies I would hate to build a storage system that could lose everthing easily as in a RAID 0 setup.
RichMacDonald wrote on 2/27/2004, 9:38 AM
>I would hate to build a storage system that could lose everthing easily as in a RAID 0 setup.

Sure. I suggest backing up :-)
The real benefit of RAID0 is speed. You'd be surprised how often the hard drive is the bottleneck.