Spot,

I'm also running the Hitachi 7K250 series SATA drives. I have six 250 gig drives and a couple of 400 gig drives. Four of the 250's are raided and the rest are running as single drives. I have been extremely satisfied with them.

Recently, I have gotten a few Seagate SATA drives on sale from Fry's Outpost. I got a couple of 250's and a 400. They, too, have been very good and come with a five-year warranty as opposed to the three-year warranty of the Hitachi's and everyone else. I used to use Seagate's back in my SCSI days and hadn't bought any of their drives in a while. Turns out that I'm really pretty impressed with their new SATA drives. Very fast, quiet and, so far, reliable. I'll definitely be buying some more.

John

I don't have any SATA drives but I built an AMD 64 with a Western Digital 120gb (WD1200jd) drive.

Quite a mover, I can tall ya that!

Just an FYI (you might already know): when you install windows you need to have the SATA drivers on a floppy or else you can't install the OS on them.

2X Maxtor 120gig SATAs.
3 year warrantee.
Can't say I've noticed a difference with non-SATA drives. I don't push my system like you probably do though.
Just the smaller round cables is a great plus. Makes for better ventilation.
Rest of the set-up is an Athlon XP 2800+ matched to an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe. Very stable!
Make sure to check out the ASUS with nVidia nForce 4 motherboard. BOXXtech made a killer dual AMD 64bit with the nForce 4.

Mario

So you're just running the raid from the MOBO rather than using a RAID controller card? And it's fast enough? What is your thruput?

Spot...

Hey I hope all is well dude. What mobo are you going to use? Dual/single cpu? Ram type? Building it yourself or 3rd party?[pcnirvana?]

Thx bro!

Ed.

Running two Maxtor 250 gig 7200 rpm drives in motherboard raid setup. Have had zero problems.

JJK

Running 2 seagate 160s in RAID0 on Promis.

1) The motherboard approach rather than a dedicated board does cost a CPU performance penalty. I've never measured it myself but I've seen some claim 10%. I don't consider this a problem but it does tie CPU/RAM to any problems with the drive. A dedicated board is safer than a RAM solution.

2) I had bad RAM for a long time causing BSODs. One night I had 3 renders going on in 1MB RAM and I crashed the hard drive. Nonrecoverable, so a fresh windows install. I've finally got things fixed up but I've had 3 reinstall nightmares in 14 months.

If I did it again (and I eventually will) I'd definitely go with a dedicated RAID board

How can I check thruput?
Let me know where/what to check, and I'll gladly check it for you.

Mario

RAID 0 on Highpoint controller, dual Xeons @ 3GHz on SuperMicro mobo, only way to fly. Nvidia pro vid card.
Ah and a decent firewire card, looks like it's PCI X. With 2 x 800 and 1 x 400 ports if they were all running flat chat PCI might have an issue.
Bob.

2 Maxator 200 SATA's
Not set up in Raid yet, OS is on one , ganna get a smaller 120 for OS and then convert.

not that you won't research this before you buy your equipment, but I've heard of a few (either cards or mobo's - don't know which was causing the problem [or possibly a combination of the two] but the card was slower performance that going directly through the mobo. Sorry, but I don't remember any brand names etc... associated with this, I only read it in passing.

So make sure to double check before you combine =)

Dave

How can I check thruput?

I believe the test utility you want is
Raptest. It's free from Canopus.

Mike

Thanks Mike.

Read...28MB/S
Write...41MB/S

Is that good??

Mario

Not bad, but not high enough...
Yeah, the Raptest is great for this, ain't it?

Update...

Here are the results after a defrag.

1st 120gig drive is partitioned 40system/80gig temp media.
C: System (Windows and apps) 62% free space
Read...48MB/S
Write...55MB/S

D: Temp Media (all captured footage, temp audio work, etc) 59% free space
Read...588MB/S (this seems weird)
Write... 94MB/S

E: Projects and Acid Loops (120gig) 65% free space
Read...46MB/S
Write...52MB/S

Mario

Seagate drives stay cool better than most drives, too, which I would think would be a factor as you start RAIDing a bunch of drives together in one system. Cool, quiet, and 5-year warrantee! I don't think they're the absolute fastest drives, but they're competitive.

Tom's Hardware just posted a review of the new WD drives (WD3200JB) that found it to be the coolest 7200rpm drive they've tested and very quiet, too. Not available in SATA yet, though.

Using Raptest:

WD Raptors (2x RAID 0) 40MB/S read, 74MB/S write
Hitachi 250s (4x RAID 5) 56MB/S read, 98MB/S write

Using RAID controllers on the ASUS P5AD2-E motherboard (I925XE chipset, LGA775 pentium 4 3.4Ghz, 800Mhz FSB, 1GB 533Mhz DDR2 memory).

John

EDIT: I just ran the thing again and got wildly different numbers. It gets better for a few times, and then it gets much worse and starts building up again.

My average over 20 attempts is 71MB/S read, and 98MB/S write.

It is definitely making the disks grind each time. Anyone know why the results vary so much run to run?

J.

I just ran across the press release from Hitachi announcing the 500 gig SATA II drives. Just think... four drives, two terabytes, no waiting!

"Deskstar 7K500 – The Hitachi 7K500 offers 500 GB, the industry's largest available capacity for high-end media center PCs, DVRs, nearline storage and other enterprise ATA applications. The SATA version of the drive ships with a large 16 MB buffer to deliver breakthrough performance for bandwidth-intensive applications. In addition to the complete set of SATA II features, the drive includes Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS), a technology used to ensure drive performance in high rotational vibration environments, where there are multiple drives in a single enclosure."

Hitachi Deskstar 7K500

John

Mr Spot,

My humble system has:
P2.8 + 1G RAM
HD1=WD74 10Krpm SATA SYSTEM DISK
HD2=WD120 7400 SATA Project Disk
HD=Maxtor160 7400 ATA Render Disk

Raptest is an old bench. Use HD TACH found here:
http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index.php?request=HdTach
It will also let you compare different drives (this is a standard test amongst many benchers for hd performance)

Any how I rate my burst speeds as per:
HD1=63.5 MB/s av read
HD2=52.5 MB/s av read
HD3=48.9 MB/s av read

2 x ST3300831AS Seagate
Capacity: 300 GB Speed: 7200 rpm
Seek time: 8 ms avg Interface: SATA
Native Command Queuing
RAID-0 striped to 600GB with MSI mainboard controller.

Ran the test four times and got:
34R / 43W
37R / 105W
36R / 103W
37R / 104W

And FYII, here are results for other plain ATA drives in the box:
160GB WD: 31R / 38W (system drive)
250GB Hitachi: 34R / 31W
250GB Hitachi: 53R / 52W
300GB Seagate ATA: 50R / 58W

I'm curious as to why most people are running RAID configurations, performance or redundancy? What specifically do you do that requires raw throughput? I'm just curious.

Of course faster is always better with drives, and all computer components, unless you are working with uncompressed video are transfer rates over 30MB/sec or so required?

I remember being very concerned about drive performance when my "benchmark" was capturing lossless using huffyuv, which required about 10MB/sec sustained rates. By 2001 any drive could do that no sweat, since then I look for a fast drive just to make Windows boot faster, applications load quickly, reduce the time for moving large files around, etc.. but I haven't noticed or seen any data supporting drives being a bottleneck in video editing. Outside of working with uncompressed streams as I noted above.

Here is one review from a very reputable source showing minimal gains from a RAID setup in real world usage. Artificial benchmarks look great but there are no significant gains in most applications. Again I want to stress that if you are constantly moving large files around or working with uncompressed video then your usage patterns will mimic the benchmark testing and you will realize speed gains. Other than that though it doesn't look promising from this report.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

On the plus side most motherboards have RAID capability and dirves are cheap so why not.

- Mark

Mark,

In my particular case, I work on projects with up to 10-12 hours or more of source material. I sometimes have 4 or 5 of these projects on the system at the same time, so my interest in RAID is about having a huge, single drive and not worrying about running out of space. Otherwise, if I use a single 250 gig drive, for example, I can get the source files for maybe two projects on the drive and have a fair amount of space left over but not enough for a third project. With a huge RAID array, it doesn't really matter (until you actually fill up the drive.)

Now, when I render these projects, I usually render to a separate physical drive and keep my temp files on yet another physical drive. A lot of my finished video doesn't actually need to be "rendered", there are large sections of untouched DV footage. In this case, Vegas is just going to copy the source video to the destination and copying from one drive to another is MUCH faster than copying files within the same physical drive. RAID's don't necessarily copy internally much faster than single drives.

If all your footage has filters, like color correction, or CG applied and all of the project really needs to be rendered, then the render speed is going to be the bottleneck, not the speed of the drives.

The "why not" of RAID has to do with the most common RAID implementation, a "RAID 0" striped array. RAID 0 is not a "true" RAID because it is NOT fault-tolerant. If one of the drives in the RAID array fails, you have lost ALL the data in the array.

John