RAID 0 - Worth it?

B

Burners

Well-known member
My project drive (media, premiere project files etc) is two 750gb configured in RAID0. I then have a 1.5gb drive as a Project drive backup.

All well and good but I heard a whisper (forget where) that these days having a RAID0 configuration does not improve performance hardly, if at all as opposed to running off one (modern) drive.

Anyone confirm or deny this? I'm keen to reduce the clutter inside my chassis!

Editing AVCHD from the 150 & DV on Premiere pro 4.1. Upgrading from a CORE 2 DUO 2.4 system to a i7 soon.

Thanks
 
Burners said:
All well and good but I heard a whisper (forget where) that these days having a RAID0 configuration does not improve performance hardly, if at all as opposed to running off one (modern) drive.
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Wikipedia is your friend here, but in short - for your two disks:

RAID 0 means striping. Half the data is written to each disk simultaneously. So it will be faster. However; you lose one disk, you'll lose all your data.

RAID 1 is mirroring. The same data is written to both disks at the same time. Read/write speeds are equal to a single disk. You lose one disk all your data is safe on the other.

Now, for the whisper you've heard;
Slicing and splicing the data to determine which part goes where takes a bit of computational power. This is normally done by a RAID controller card, something most PC does not have. So the workload has to be absorbed by your CPU. On older machines this could tax the system quite a bit, reducing the RAID performance significantly.

On a newer machine like your Core 2 Duo, you should still see a performance increase with RAID 0.
 
Networker said:
On a newer machine like your Core 2 Duo, you should still see a performance increase with RAID 0.
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You will see a mild improvement, but in my view, it is not worth the added cost, or the risk of file corruption from a bad write, or drive failure.

Last night i had a drive start clicking (or maybe I knew it was going bad, as I found it all by itself, outside of a case about a month ago. I put it in a case, to test it and it tested fine. Wanted to record the ufc fight from sat, and found it didn't work then, so i used a different one)

In any case, if a drive starts to go bad, or starts to have bad writes/reads, generally with a straight drive, you can remove the contents. On a raid, and writing these files the way they do, if you get a bad write, your file is done!

To me any speed improvement is not worth it.
A 10 hour encode on a normal drive might speed up to 9 hours and 10 minutes on the raid.

I have seen better improvement going to an i7 processor over a raid hard drive.
 
I'll second that it isn't worth putting in. You might get a slight improvement, but your risk of data loss goes up a huge amount. Protecting your data should be your main consideration.

That said, more than two disks in a RAID0 configuration will give you much more significant improvement on a modern system, but you'd need to have some sort of better backup system in place for that to be a good choice. Hard drives do tend to be slower than the rest of the system.
 
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Being in the computer biz. I can tell you that if you want real performance do raid zero. But use the Raptor Drives made by wetsern digital...they are 15k rpm SCSI performance. You will be amazed at how fast it is. It will render much quicker. Or even better get a solid state drive...but they are big $$$$$$. What the others say about back ups are true. However the main bottle neck in a computer system is the HD. They have changed little over the last 10 years. It wont be long ..mark my word...that all systems will have sold state drives because memory is getting so cheap.
 
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Burners said:
My project drive (media, premiere project files etc) is two 750gb configured in RAID0. <snip>
Editing AVCHD from the 150 & DV on Premiere pro 4.1.
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Well lets see, an average crappy 7200rpm HDD can easily handle about 20-25MBps sustained transfer speeds. Burst speed is in the 60-70MBps range.

AVCHD at max rate is well under 4MBps.
 
I'm not so interested in Raid 0, I'm starting a Raid 1 this week! (Mirroring)... I had my 6 month old external 2TB hard drive go bad on me a month ago, They send me a replacement about 2-3 weeks ago. And now that one started "clicking" and went to crap!!!

2 fairly new Hard Drives crapped out in a month... Thank god for backups!!!
 
Burners said:
My project drive (media, premiere project files etc) is two 750gb configured in RAID0. I then have a 1.5gb drive as a Project drive backup.

All well and good but I heard a whisper (forget where) that these days having a RAID0 configuration does not improve performance hardly, if at all as opposed to running off one (modern) drive.
Click to expand...
Not sure where you heard that, but if you are using it as a project drive, your disk reads and writes can be roughly twice as fast. That's a huge performance improvement. 750's aren't too old, so the "modern" drive would need to be twice as fast to keep up. I recently switched my RAID0 from 2x500s to 2x1TBs and it is a lot faster, but one drive wouldn't have been.

There is no question RAID 0 performance is better, the question is if you will notice the difference. Figure you see this anytime files are being read/written or when an application is waiting on the disk. If you are editing AVCHD directly and outputting to a compressed format (like mpeg), you will unlikely see much difference between a laptop drive and a fast RAID. You will see big improvement in speed from the i7, but with too many video streams, the cpu will still max out far before the disk throughput. If you use intraframe codecs, or ever work with uncompressed files, the extra disk speed will really come in handy.

So it comes down to if the benefits are worth the hassles/risks to you. Don't even think about leaving important files on a RAID 0 unless you have a regular backup and are willing to lose data in between those backups. And to those who haven't learned the hard way, that thinking should be applied towards single drives too!

Skilled said:
Being in the computer biz. I can tell you that if you want real performance do raid zero. But use the Raptor Drives made by wetsern digital...they are 15k rpm SCSI performance. You will be amazed at how fast it is. It will render much quicker. Or even better get a solid state drive...but they are big $$$$$$.
Click to expand...
I would only bother to use those as OS drives due to their quick access times and small size. The modern, larger, cheaper drives do extremely well with sustained data transfer, which is the main factor when it comes to large media files.

I'm waiting out the fast SSDs to drop a bit more and would love to have them for OS. 15k drives are too loud for me ;)
 
mcsmooth said:
Not sure where you heard that, but if you are using it as a project drive, your disk reads and writes can be roughly twice as fast. That's a huge performance improvement. 750's aren't too old, so the "modern" drive would need to be twice as fast to keep up. I recently switched my RAID0 from 2x500s to 2x1TBs and it is a lot faster, but one drive wouldn't have been.

There is no question RAID 0 performance is better, the question is if you will notice the difference. Figure you see this anytime files are being read/written or when an application is waiting on the disk. If you are editing AVCHD directly and outputting to a compressed format (like mpeg), you will unlikely see much difference between a laptop drive and a fast RAID. You will see big improvement in speed from the i7, but with too many video streams, the cpu will still max out far before the disk throughput. If you use intraframe codecs, or ever work with uncompressed files, the extra disk speed will really come in handy.

So it comes down to if the benefits are worth the hassles/risks to you. Don't even think about leaving important files on a RAID 0 unless you have a regular backup and are willing to lose data in between those backups. And to those who haven't learned the hard way, that thinking should be applied towards single drives too!


I would only bother to use those as OS drives due to their quick access times and small size. The modern, larger, cheaper drives do extremely well with sustained data transfer, which is the main factor when it comes to large media files.

I'm waiting out the fast SSDs to drop a bit more and would love to have them for OS. 15k drives are too loud for me ;)
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I disagree here.. I use a i7.. And it never (Vegas) maxes my cpu. However just using a raptor drive increased my rendering time by 30% and that was NO raid. If you want performace..use the raptors...then use the larger TB to move your rendered files to. You can get the raptors in like 300gig now.
 
It depends upon what performance gains you are looking for.

Fast hard drive speeds will not help with AVCHD editing. The CPU is the bottleneck with AVCHD files.

If you are looking at faster rendering or file conversion, here again the hard drive can only write as fast as the CPU can dish it out.

In the video editing world, the first upgrade should be the CPU.

I edit files from a Flash XDR, EX-1 and Canopus HQ files (AVCHD converted) on 1.5 gb drives and have no issues in a multica environment.

I put a camera per drive for this setup.

So unless you need to edit uncompressed HD, the drive speed of modern SATA hard drives is plenty for most needs.

I looked at RAID and went with a shadow system. Which means I purchased two of every drive. I keep a synced copy of the all the drives on their sister with a great little program called "syncback".

Acts like a RAID 0 with out all of the setup of the RAID.

Rule of thumb, the higher the bitrate the more the video stresses the hard drives and less on the CPU.

Good luck
 
Skilled said:
I disagree here.. I use a i7.. And it never (Vegas) maxes my cpu. However just using a raptor drive increased my rendering time by 30% and that was NO raid. If you want performace..use the raptors...then use the larger TB to move your rendered files to. You can get the raptors in like 300gig now.
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If that is the case, your rendering is doing heavy work with the disk. This could be from many factors; your output format, your NLE's use of temp files, what disk you have temp files, video files and output files on, etc.

Sure, you can get a 300GB velociraptor for $200+ and gain 30% speed... or you can get 2 1TB drives for <$200 and gain ~100% speed, lots of space, a few bucks, and a few dbs of noise. Not saying they aren't great drives, they certainly are, but you pay a premium. You'll get much more worth out of them as an OS drive due to their fast access times.

Bassman2003 said:
I looked at RAID and went with a shadow system. Which means I purchased two of every drive. I keep a synced copy of the all the drives on their sister with a great little program called "syncback".

Acts like a RAID 0 with out all of the setup of the RAID.
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That would actually be more like RAID 1 which is used for redundancy whereas RAID 0 is for performance only. Many people rely on RAID 1 as a backup, which is BAD, so I would always first recommend a backup solution like what you are using. The best reason for this is human error... if you screw up your own files (bad change saved, delete, virus, etc) on a RAID1, its screwed up on both disks.
 
booggerg2 said:
just do a Raid 5 configuration.
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This would need at least 3 drives and either a SW- or HW-based RAID controller capable of such.

BTW, one of the mods over at REDUSER (Jeff? Brook??) said they were using two 6-bay enclosures, each configured in RAID 5, but both were striped together (in RAID 0) with data throughput in the high hundreds (aka RAID 50 setup). He also has LTO drives to back up the data on the RAIDs.
 
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