Raid 5 Questions

My company is finally committed to making the jump into the HD pool. We're going to make the first upgrade in the storage department, since everything else we can rent for the time being. We edit corporate video shot on DVCPRO HD. I know that firewire 800 is technically fast enough to handle DVCPRO HD, but for future proofing I want to go esata. It seems that Raid 5 is the best combo as far as backup and value. My questions are as follows:
Will disk utility stripe to raid 5, or do I have to get a tower that will stripe to raid 5 using it's own hardware / software? I am running tiger and can't find an option to stripe raid 5 in disk utility. Does Leopard offer this, or perhaps third party software? Or is raid 5 only configured via hardware on the drive tower itself?
What towers have people been using successfully? I would like it to have at least 4 drive bays.
What type of esata card will work well with a Quad G5 (which uses the PCI express slots)?
Of course, if I'm way off the mark and there is a better solution for my storage needs I'm open to suggestion. I know there is a raid 6, but couldn't find any towers that supported it during my search.
Thanks in Advance,
Brandon

Any kind of esata box and card can do disk utility raid 0, all you need just make sure is the performance. it has to be sustained. http://www.AJA.com has speed software to check the data rate.
Be aware that you might lose performance if choosing a software-based RAID 5.
it's entirely possible that you max out your resource in order to edit HD and maintain software RAID 5.
For a hardware RAID, I would 2nd to CalDigit's HDPro.
If you only need a 4-bay raid and want to use your own drives, take a look at caldigit's RAID card or Apple RAID card. Both are pretty inexpensive.
You are able to use 4 to 16 drives with caldigit RAID card, so they pretty much have all the systems that will fit your needs, the raid card or hdpro.
Good luck with the new RAID and let us know how it works. Storing all the data in a good hardware RAID without worrying about losing them is very stress relieving.

Similar Messages

Newbie FCP HDV monitoring and RAID questions

Hello forum gods.
First off, I must confess - I am a defector seeking assylum in the the Mac camp. I am a born-and-bred Windows person, and a longtime Avid editor who just made the jump and purchased the Mac-Pro with all the bells and whistles, and FCP Studio. I did this to accompany my JVC ProHD cam and deck.
I have no idea what I am going to do with the time I used to spend scanning for viruses and trojans. I am thinking I may write a novel, or build a house by hand - but that is another topic.
Now that the confession is out of the way - we can move on to the actual questions.
<big breath>
Ok - so I have this new fancy shiny computer, deck, camera, and monitors - one of which is the Sony 23" that is comparable to the Apple 23. I do not have a Kona or Blackmagic card because I was told that I did not need one right away - though I do plan on getting one later. For monitoring, I was going to use the firewire in/out of the JVC deck and convert the signal via the component outs to another HD monitor. This would bring the total monitors on the system to 3 - a 19" for the edit screen, the 23" for the video playback in FCP and the braodacast HD for monitoring the final signal.
Is this workable?
Now for the second question - storage and RAID.
Most of my footage will be either SD or HDV. Eventually I'll be going to XDCam, but that's a bit down the road. I have the internal 250 gigger that came in the Mac, and I purchased additional 500gb SATA II drives that I was going to use to set up a RAID. Should I do this internal or external? Will it work? What else do I need? What is the meaning of life?
Thanks for your replies. My credit card is anxiously awaiting your suggestions
G5 Quad Mac OS X (10.4.8)
G5 Quad Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Some question back atcha:
1) When you say you'll be working in SD, what do you
mean? Typically, SD refers to uncompressed 601, 720 X
486. Or are you referring to DV NTSC?
DV NTSC and/or the myriad formats that the JVC100 can do.
2) Your Profile says you have a Quad G5, but your
post says it's a MacPro. Which is it?
Sorry - Consider that my first public gaffe in the new Mac world. I bought the Mac Pro. Time to change my profile. I bought it last week - it isn't even here yet. Supposed to be delivered today...
3) Are you wanting to see your HDV sequence on a
external video monitor while you're editing? If so,
you'll need the Kona card (or the Blackmagic card,
but I don't do BMD, only Aja, so I don't know about
the Blackmagic offerings.)
I've read about the Cinema Preview function and although I know that this isn't the best idea for monitoring, wouldn't it work? On the JVC deck, it has the firewire output/input and component outs (among others) so in E-to-E mode, couldn't the deck act as my converter for monitoring on the broadcast monitor? If not - I have a line on a Kona-2 with the BOB for about $1400. Deal or no deal?
Now as for your RAID question, you can do either
internal or external. Just don't include the drive
that contains your system folder in the RAID.
I was planning on using the 250 for all my system files and the 2-500 giggers as my edit drives. Sound good?
EDIT: As for the meaning of life, go ask your father.
Gaah... He handed me "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and told me to get to reading....
Thanks for the help. Lord knows I need it.

Power Mac G4 RAID Question

After successfully putting OS X Leopard on my Power Mac G4, I then gasped at the amount of space I had; from the built in 10 GB hard drive, I had a couple hundred MegaBytes left. However, I recently pulled a 40 GB Hard Drive from another computer, and installed it. The Mac had no problem identifying and formatting it.
However, having very little space and more things to install, my question is this; How do I set up this Mac to identify the 2 internal drives as one single drive? I have done a little research, and discovered Disk Utility's ability to configure a sort of "Software RAID," but cannot find a good guide as to define how to actually do so. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance,
Jordan. Meow!

OK, you're not going to get much speed out of OSX with only 50 GB to start with, since Leopard does best with 100 GB or 30% Free space, but anyway, boot from the Install Disc...
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
*Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.*
Select one of the drives, click on the RAID tab, Raid type select Concatenated RAID set, drag to two drives on the left to the window on the right, iirc.

RAID question

We currently have our 10g database connected to our storage array (RAID10). We're going to upgrade our servers to 64-bit machines, and in the process the physical DBA wants to start storing our data on the local drive system (RAID5).
There is sufficient space on the new server, and it's easily upgradable if our growth estimates are incorrect. The general consensus here is that in the case of disk failure, a modern RAID5 system no longer takes an unnacceptable amount of time to rebuild a disk.
As the logical DBA, I am concerned about changes, especially when I don't fully understand the technology. Is there anything I should be worried about, or good questions I could ask in order to insure that we get the same performance level and availability? My knowledge of RAID is purely theoretical, and comes from articles I've accessed on the web.
Thanks
-cf

the first thing comes to my mind is your primary concern will be write speed impact on your system.
RAID 5 have superior disk read rate but moderate to low write rate because of the parity generation.
RAID 10 have over all better IO rates.
It's also interesting to know there're definitition between Physical and Logical DBA somewhere. :)

Xserve disks and RAID questions

I have an Intel Xserve with its two original 750 GB disks. These are configured as RAID 1 (mirror).
I intend to purchase an identical disk as a hot spare and upgrade two old G4s with four each of the same disks as reserve web servers/backup.
The original disks are Seagate ST3750640NS which I can buy for £140 although the Apple price is £386 including the disk carrier. Apple refuses to sell the disk carriers separately.
The PCI boards I have found are:
http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata1v4.html
and
http://www.sonnettech.com/product/temposatax4i.html
costing $120 and $200 respectively.
There are PC boards as cheap as $20 but these may have bootability and compatibility issues. There appears to be little information about the proportion of hard/soft RAID resulting from any of these boards.
My questions are:
1 - Is there an inexpensive way of buying disk carriers for recent Xserves?
2 - Are there alternative satisfactory PCI boards?
3 - Do such boards differ much in terms of RAID types supported?
4 - Do such boards differ much in terms of the degree to which they are host computer independent? - ie more hard than soft and hence, presumably, faster.

>1 - Is there an inexpensive way of buying disk carriers for recent Xserves?
I'm not aware of any sources other than Apple (at least that I'd trust).
>2 - Are there alternative satisfactory PCI boards?
There are several manufacturers who make PCI RAID cards that you can use. You've listed two, but there are others including the RocketRAID series, and those from ACard.
>3 - Do such boards differ much in terms of RAID types supported?
In my opinion, you get what you pay for.
Cheap cards may support RAID 0 and 1, while more expensive cards may add RAID 5. This may or may not be important for you if you're just mirroring.
There are going to be performance differences between each card. Since you're using G4's, though, you're going to have other bottlenecks, so disk speed isn't likely to be a big factor.
>4 - Do such boards differ much in terms of the degree to which they are host computer independent? - ie more hard than soft and hence, presumably, faster.
If you get a card that works in a Mac, it's likely to also work in other hardware. The same can not necessarily be said the other way around - cheap PC-centric cards may not support Macs, mostly because of driver issues.
Note that you may also have issues with booting - not all cards can create bootable volumes which may leave you out in the cold if you don't check that first.

RAID questions

I have a couple of questions on Raid. According to Danny, ICH5R is not hardware raid. This question was risen in my last post "Help creating partitions in RAID 0 volume", because it seems Partiton Magic only works with hardware raid. Also, I got the impression that a RAID 0 volume can only be created in a Dynamic Disk. However, Windows disk manager shows my Raid 0 volume as being a Basic disk. I'm confused. My questions:
- Does software in general recognize my Raid setup as being software raid (ICH5R)?
- Is it true that there is little gain in speed with software raid?
- Why does my raid volume show up as being a basic disk?
- How much does it cost a TRUE hardare raid controller? Any decisive advantages over my mobo's ICH5R?
- As anyone used Partion Magic for partitoning Raid volumes using software raid?
I've been serching the web for answers but I've found more contradictions than answers Any help is appreciated. Thanks

I can't answer all your questions but here's a start.
Theoretically, the ICH5R has twice the bandwidth of the PCI bus so should be faster. In practice, most people with FIS2R boards have found the Promise controller a little quicker. It seemed a little faster for me as well but it wasn't a huge difference and I suspect it depends on what you're using it for. As for hardware/software issues, I don't know. I do know that I got hard drive performance increases of between 30 and 70% on both Raid controllers compared to a single drive depending on which benchmark program I used and the type of test. I also found that Partition Magic 8 seems to function properly using the boot floppy with either the Intel or Promise Raid controller. I also use Drive Image 7 which comes with a boot CD and it works with both Raids as well. I have learned the hard way not to use any features where you make changes in Windows and the program then boots automatically into DOS to make changes and then boots into Windows again. If the program is not completely compatible with the 865/875 chipset(I doubt any can promise that yet), it will hang in Dos mode and you're stuck with a Dos partition at the beginning of your C drive. So I like to boot these programs from a floppy/CD.
I'm not satisfied yet that the Raid0 config is really stable so I have WinXP installed on a single SATA in the Intel controller and a Raid0 array on the Promise controller for all my media/Games. I also put my pagefile on the Raid. This allows me to load game levels/movies/large images etc... quickly and keep my OS a little safer. After Windows loads, it doesn't access the XP drive much anyway with 1GB of memory. Then I just periodically save important media/game saves on the XP drive or CD and use drive image to save the OS on the Raid drive.
Hope that helps answer some of your questions.

X-Raid question about adding more drives

Hi Guys.
I am running an X Server (10.3.8 dual 2GHZ PPC G5)with an X-Raid attached. Right now it is only half full with a RAID5 volume that is my main file server.
My question is can i add three 500GB drives into the empty slots of my X-Raid and congiure them as another RAID5 volume without killing my current drives setup on the X-Raid?
Thanks for any help.

You can do it hot. The 3 drives you insert will not affect the exiting RAID set in any way whatsoever. The Xserve RAID supports up to 3 RAID sets per RAID controller (each controller handles one "half" of the array -- so 7 drives). What you're doing is very common.
The only thing I say is that you need to be sure you replace the 3 unused "blanks" and don't accidentally eject one of the drives that's already part of a RAID set. This should be pretty obvious as the "live" drives have blue and green lights, and the blanks have none, but other than that, it's a cakewalk.

Raid question, can it be done or not

hi, and thanks in advance for any help given regarding my question.
i have two raptors set up as a mirrored raid array, my question is can i go into bios and change them to a stripped array (raid 0) for peformance without having to reinstall xp and if so what are the best settins?

I can confirm supershanks answer, as i've TRIED it.. and no, if you change ANY of the nVraid settings, you have to reinstall windows..
I don't think this is the case with all RAID controllers though, as the promise controller on my other board, was more flexible..
you could just make a ghost image of your current setup, then change the settings, and ghost it back. check my sig for instructions using ghost with nvraid

Mirrored RAID Question

Possibly a dumb question: If Mac OSX (10.4.11 in this case) boots from a mirrored RAID (2 drives), is there any additional protection from routine disk directory errors? Again, I'm not asking about the physical failure of one of the drives, but from the type of directory errors that sometimes happen after a system freeze or loss of AC power to the system.
Another way of asking the same question: Will disk directory errors in one drive be automatically mirrored in the second drive, or will the second drive not have the same directory errors?
Background: I've got an older G4 tower with two identical drives installed that I use as a play/experiment computer. I can either keep the two drives totally independent and do daily (or even more often) total, bootable backups from the primary to the backup drive, or else configure as a mirrored RAID.
Thanks.

Both drives should be on independent bus or using a controller. The MDD has two buses, but ATA/66 and ATA/100 differ by 4% and enough difference to not recommend using two drives in any form of stripped or mirrored RAID.
Two drives on same bus, master/slave I would avoid as the bus has to wait for one drive for I/O before it can talk to the second drive.
With an SATA no such problem or limitation, or using an ATA controller with two independent channels.

RAID Question? K8N Neo...

I just purchased the K8N Neo Platinum and noticed right away that my Maxtor 6Y08OMO 7200rpm SATA HD has just became a speed demon.. It now beats my 15K rpm Cheatah and my Raptors... My question is can I have two completely diferent RAID arrays? One for Windows XP on the two Raptors and one with the two Maxtors for high speed storage/video editing stuff???
Maybe like this:
SATA 1/2 = Raptors in RAID 0
SATA 3/4 = Maxtors in RAID 0
Can I do this on the K8N Neo Platinum?
If I can do this than I will be getting a second Maxtor right away...
Thanks in advance...

Quote
Originally posted by }SkOrPn--'
I know I can do RAID but didnt know if I could do 2 RAID arrays simultaneously. If so than I will get another Maxtor drive. Thanks for replying.
I love this board...
You can.
You should look into raid 0+1 for the raptors though.

MSI Neo-FIS2R build questions! & SATA RAID questions!

This is going to sound like a stupid question. And I'm not even sure that I know what I am asking.
I've built two computers so far. One with an MSI K7N2G-L and another with an MSI K7N2G-ILSR. Both nForce2 motherboards with AMD processors.
Here's what I'm getting at... I'm planning on building a new machine with either the Abit IC7-G or the MSI Neo-FIS2R (both 875P boards obviously).
Now, when I built the two nForce2 boards it was really easy. I put all of the components together, turned on the machine, the bios auto enabled settings, I put the windows xp pro cd in the cd drive and formatted the hard drive for NTFS, I then installed the OS and booted the system! Then I intstalled the drivers fromt the MSI CD. Ran Live BIOS and flashed to the most current motherboard BIOS. SIMPLE! Everything worked fine.
Here's my question. For the 875P system will everything pretty much happen the same way? Or do I need to do additional things? One of my main concerns (especially if I go with the Abit IC7-G over the MSI) is flashing the bios. Do I need a floppy drive or something? I've never flashed a BIOS outside of the Live BIOS utility. I don't want to put a floppy drive in my system! What are my options here?
Not that I want to do it, but if I needed to (say with the Abit board) HOW DO I FLASH THE BIOS WITHOUT USING THE LIVE BIOS UTILTY?
Bottom line is, I'm building this system for someone else and I want it all to be a painless experience (especially if they are looking over my shoulder).
One final question. This may sound even more stupid than the first question. I'm purchasing SATA drives ONLY. I'm not purchasing any IDE drives. So, here's my question...Can I boot from a SATA drive? What if it's in RAID 0? From the posts in the forums it appears that the SATA and RAID on these 875P motherboards either doesn't work or isn't very reliable (may potentially lose data). IS THIS AT ALL TRUE?! I'm stupid when it comes to RAID and SATA. Any help in this department would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Quote
Originally posted by ZippyGaloo
1. If I only install one SATA drive I have to set it up as a RAID anyway right? Wrong?
2. If I install two SATA drives I have to set it up as a RAID as well right? Wrong?
3. If I install two SATA drives and set up a RAID
(either 0 or 1) which drive does the OS go on?
I have never built a raid array (as yet) and have never owned a SATA disk (as yet), but from what I have read...
RAID is a method of connecting several disks together so they perform as a single disk. That means, in response to your points above:
1) If you install only one drive (SATA or not), it will not be set up as RAID.
2) If you install two SATA drives, you have the option of using them as two individual drives OR setting them up in a RAID 0 or 1 configuration.
3) Ok, RAID 0 is known as "striping" - this method makes two disks look like one big disk, that works twice as fast as the individual drives. Every time the PC writes data to the drive, it sends the first bit of data to drive 1, the second to drive 2, then drive 1 again etc etc. This speeds up the disk read/write time, as the two disks can both work simultaneously. To the OS though, the two drives appear as one. The OS will be spread across both disks - it needs both of them connected to run, take either disk out and you'll be left with half an OS (that obviously won't work)
With RAID 1 (known as "mirroring"), you still use two disks. You will only have a useable capacity of the smallest disk however (using two 40gb drives only gives you a total of 40gb of space. with RAID 0, two 40gb disks will make one big one - nearly 80gb large {I think the RAID system itself uses a bit of space}). The advantage with mirroring, is the second disk holds an exact copy of the first. If one disk goes bang, you have a duplicate copy on the second - so, to answer your point above, the OS will reside on both disks.
To summarize, RAID 0 is good for increasing speed; RAID 1 is good for increasing protection of your data as you have two copies incase a drive gives up. To get the best of both worlds you need RAID 0+1 (this method needs 4 disks though, 2 striped - then 2 mirroring the striped).
There is a lot to RAID - just search the net for some manuals if you're interested, hope this gives you an idea though (providing I've got it right!)

Another Raid Question

Hi All:
I may have missed this in one of the stickies, but please don't yell at me.
I am now running raid 0 via the Promise chip on my 865pe Neo2 FIS2R, (this was my first build and I didn't realize I could set up raid with the ICH5R chip).
My question is knowing that I would have to re-install my os and everthing else, would it be worth it in terms of a performance increase to go to the trouble of switching over to the ICH5R controller?
Thanks for any info you can share with me.
BigAL

Yes you would. But the good news is that the Promise controller appears to be the better performing one, so leave things just as they are

PATA Raid Question using Nvidia Raid

Hi!,
I have 2 Seagate 120 gig ATA drives (not SATA) I have installed on my PC. One is set to master, the other is set as slave. I decided to raid them (mirroring) using NRAID. Here is my question. It seems everything is working fine and the raid is healthy but 1 thing concerns me...........The drives are not exactly the same size. 1 shows up as 111.79 GB the other shows up as 111.76 GB. I know its not a huge difference, Should I be concerned?

Strange, what does the RAID BIOS say?
Maybe it's just a bug somewhere in the utility?

Simple RAID question

I'm a lifetime PC user who just switched to Mac. I do video work, and in my PC setup, I like to have one OS/Apps drive and 2 other drives that I put in RAID 0 to speed up video editing. I back up all completed projects, so I don't care about mirroring. I've been looking at RAID posts, and it sounds like you have to wipe ALL drives clean to set up a RAID on a Mac. Can I just add in my two drives for striping, and leave my system drive alone?
Thanks in advance for any help.
2.66 Ghz Quad Xeon, 2 GB RAM, 250 GB HD Mac OS X (10.4.9)

Hatter,
Your suggestion here is just what I've been looking for.
Drive #
1 - boot drive with OS and all applications
2 - data and projects
3 and 4 - RAID for editing
You could put your media files or data and backups on external drives, FireWire.
Question here for anyone...please!
I work in FCP 5.1.4 and with my setup I feel it should be faster and I've been wanting to setup a RAID 0 setup. I have 2 of my drives (2 & 3) which is a TB combined that I'd like to turn into a RAID ) to speed up rendering, editing etc.
Can you point me in the direction in how to do that? As I'm converting these 2 drives, is there anything I should be careful about?
And, in FCP under pref's, it won't allow me to allocate more than 2560MB. ****, I've got 16GB in my system. So, is there anything here I can do to speed things up and allocating more ram to the program?
One other thing..if I do convert Drive 2 & 3 to a RAID 0 are there any down side issues that this causes. Crashes, App confusion and stalling etc?
MacPro, 2 x 3GHz Dual Core, 16GB ram, 4 x 500GB drives Mac OS X (10.4.9)
MacPro, 2 x 3GHz Dual Core, 16GB ram, 4 x 500GB drives Mac OS X (10.4.9)
MacPro, 2 x 3GHz Dual Core, 16GB ram, 4 x 500GB drives Mac OS X (10.4.9)

P67A-GD53 RAID Question

Hi All
Very quick question re RAID set-up on a P67A-GD53. Sorry if this analogy is lost on everyone, but do these boards handle arrays like, say, a Dell PERC card does? Essentially, is the array handled entirely by the hardware and transparent to any Operating System/Hypervisor that may be installed on the volumes presented to it by the controller.
I'm sure the answer, whatever it may be, is common to all MSI boards with RAID controllers and possibly to all consumer boards-I've just never had any experience of them!
Many thanks
Rob

Onboard RAIDs are mainly software controlled unlike hardware RAIDs by add-on cards.

GT60 ONC raid question

Hi, i have a GT60 ONC , currently running a ssd and hdd configuration. Since the gt60 only support 1 bay for sata 2 speed and 1 bay for sata 3 speed so i guess its pointless to raid 0 them with ssd. However i just saw the refreshed version of GT60 ONE and it features a super raid controller. My question is can i buy and install the super raid controller on my GT60 ONC and buy 2 msata ssd for a raid 0 configuration?.
Thanks.

It's not complete pointless i installed 2 SSD drives (RAID 0) in my GT60-16F3 and it's almost twice as fast as with 1 SSD but your right on the part that you dont get the full speed as with 2x Sata 3 so yeh it's a shame that it is a sata 2 and 3 why not 2x sata 3 ?
But thats marketing i think.
It would be nice to be able to update/grade it with a super raid controller maybe it is possible if it is would love to see a guide/manual how to do.

Raid 5 Questions

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