SSD/RAID set up - limited budget.

I'm building a PC with the following specs for 1080p/2k editing on PPro and AE CC:
CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz
Memory: G.Skill Sniper Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1866 Memory
Storage 01: Crucial M550 256GB SSD
Storage 02: Crucial M550 256GB SSD
Storage 03: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200RPM HDD
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 760 (4GB VRAM)
I intend to do a striped RAID setup (RAID0) on the two SSDs.
Would it be worthwhile getting a third SSD exclusively for the OS (Windows 8.1) and running a software RAID on the two other SSDs?
Is firmware RAID an option for this configuration and if so is it in any way advantageous over the software RAID setup?
Thanks in advance.

By 'hardware RAID,' do you mean a motherboard chip, or a dedicated PCI-E card?
Is there an affordable means to the latter?

Similar Messages

  • Advice on RAID Sets, Volume Sets, and RAID Levels of the Volume Sets using an Areca Controller

    I have read through a lot of information on disk usage, storage rules for an editing rig, users inquiries/member responses in this forum and I thank each and every one of you – especially Harm.
    In building my new workstation, I purchased five (5) WD 1T, 7k, 64M SATAIII hard drives and an Areca RAID card, ARC-1880ix-16-4G, which I plan to use primarily as my media/data disk array.  The workstation will use a 128GB SATAIII SSD as the OS/program drive and I will transfer two (2) WD Raptor/10k SATA 70GB drives from my current system for pagefile/scratch/render use.  I tentatively plan on using a mobo SATAIII port for the SSD and mobo SATA ports with a software RAID (level 0) for the 10k Raptors.
    In reading the Areca Instruction manual, I am now considering exactly how I should configure the 5 physical 1TB drives in terms of RAID Level(s), Volume Sets, and RAID Sets.  I must admit that I like the opportunity of allowing for a Dedicated Hot Spare as I am generally distrustful of the MTBF data that drive vendors tout and have the bad experience in the past of losing data from a mal-configured RAID array and a single drive hardware failure (admittedly, my fault!).
    In line with the logic that one doesn’t want to perform disk reading while trying to write at the same time (or vice-versa), I am thinking the approach above should work OK in using the mobo disk interface and both software and external hardware RAID controllers without having to create separate RAID level configurations within a Volume Set or further dividing up the physical drives into separate RAID sets.  I know in forum messages that Harm noted that he had 17 drives and I could envision a benefit to having separate RAID sets in that situation, but I am not at that point yet. 
    To some degree I think it might be best to just create one RAID Level on one Volume Set on one RAID Set, but want to solicit thoughts from veteran controller users on their workflows/thoughts in these regards.
    Anyone care to share thoughts/perspectives?  Thanks
    Bill

    Thanks for the speedy feedback Harm - I appreciate it.
    I was thinking RAID level 3 as well.
    Of course, it's always something!   I purchased the Caviar Blacks by mistake - which are non-TLER.   I will work with EggHead to return the ones I purchased and replace them with RE4 versions  as I'm not thrilled about the possibility of the controller declaring the volume/disks degraded unnecessarily and although I have the DOS utility WDTLER where one is supposed to be able to enable/disable TLER on WD drives  - I suspect WD is way beyond that now anyway with current builds.
    I agree with you about just testing the performance of the options for the raptors - on the mobo and then on the controller.  When I benchmark them I'll post the results in case others are curious.
    Thanks again....off to EggHead!

  • RAID Set not showing up - 3 severe events

    Intelle Xserve running 10.6 RAID Card running firmware v E-1.3.2.0, Two it drives set up with I think RAID 5.
    The main person for the  system is away as well as his backup. So I'm running on very little information at the moment.
    Log:
    Called in due to user not able to access shared files (Also shared FileMakerpro databases and Portfolio server). Only access to server was via screen share.
    Could not connect. After trying all that I could, powered down the server. Restarted, got a login startup permissions error for an item to run at startup. (I'll have to check what exactly that was). Started the Portfolia server and the FileMakerpro databases. Users able to access and use.
    Next day same thing. User lost connection with the server. Restarted, start filemakerpro databases and portfoilio services. User able to access.
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    About 15 minutes later I get a call that the user lost connection again.
    Restart the once again. This time get errors from the RAID utility:
    Non-viable RAID set RS1 and all associated volumes are offline
    Drive 3:500 missing - Replace immediately or acknowledge loss of RAID set RS1 and associated volumes
    Drive 3:500 missing - Previous drive status was inuse
    The RAID utility does not show a RAID set.
    The drive appear to be OK
    The drive shows up on the desktop but when I go into the drive the folders etc are showing. Access the main folder results in a loop where it bails out and just shows the desktop again.
    I'm going to get some files to the user from the timemachine backup for now.
    Is it possible that the data is OK and maybe the drive are marked off line for the set but still OK?
    Any info would be great,
    Thanks

    Yes the 160GB has the OS. I'm coming into this cold as the main person and the backup are currently away.
    I have got the users a work around so they can do thier work. The backup person has very limited email contact and he had thought it was a RAID 5.B  But I would agree this looks to be a RAID 0 or 1 since there are only two drive available for data.

  • SSD Raid 0 With 2011 MBP

    I have a late 2011 15" MBP with 2x Intel SSD x25-M 160gb drives (1 in the main bay, 1 in the optical bay). I chose these drives due to the limited bandwidth in the optical bay (it's restricted to 3g vs the main bays 6g).
    I have found an issue that is rather curious when trying to install OSX onto the machine and it concerns the disk utility:
    OS X Recovery Disk Assistant created with Mavericks will NOT see either SSD installed in either bay using the disk assistant (no format or parition possible of either drive.  I can place the drives in external cases and they work flawlessly i.e. you can partition each drive but when you put the partitioned drives back in the MBP Mavericks will not see them).
    OS X Recovery Disk Assistant created with Lion will see BOTH drives and will configure raid 0 successfully (once installed I ran the Mavericks install and it did not see the drive with Lion Installed on it so no upgrade was possible - I ran the internet download as well as trying to install Mavericks from an external firewire drive using a previous download of OSX 10.9).
    I am about to try installing Mountain Lion to see if it will detect the SSD raid drive (it's downloading now).  If that works I will try to then upgrade to Mavericks (doing this incrementally kinda *****).
    I'm wondering if anyone else has ran into this problem?  I have seen plenty of YouTube videos of people putting two SSDs in their MBPs and running Raid 0 with plenty of success.  I'm just wondering if maybe there's a brick wall with anything other than a 13" MBP?
    Thanks in advance.

    Kappy - I think you missed part of the information in my last post:
    I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY created and installed OSX (Snow Leopard, Lion, & Moutain Lion) using the Disk Utility provided by Apple to install fresh versions of each and they work perfectly.
    I DID NOT clone these from external drives.
    I would like to install Mavericks (I don't care at this point about the raid config but it would be nice) but the disk utility version of Mavericks (that you need to install that specific OS) will not see the SSDs installed inside the MBP.  Even if I install Mountain Lion on a single drive and then try to upgrade to Mavericks the drives are not seen.
    Even if i could clone the Mavericks install from an external drive onto the internal raid I still can't see either drive to even do it.

  • Can I delete a two SSD Raid 0?

    Attempted to setup a RAID 0 using two SSD drives, using Disk Utility.
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    CCC stated that it couldn't do that because one of the drives in RAID had no Recovery Partition.
    Now I cannot delete the RAiD setup to go back and reformat the individual drives to include the Recovery partition.
    Other than being out of my mind, what am I doing wwrong here?
    All this is on a 2012 Mac Pro running Maverick OS.

    I don't know if this will help or not, but I did have a problem in attempting to "De-Construct" a RAID array that got broken somehow and I wanted to change the striping from mirrored (RAID 1) to RAID 0. Since this was a LaCie External Little Bisk 250GB SSD, I wrote to them and received a reply (the Disk Utility application cannot "De-Construct" a RAID array once created by that application, but it can be easily accomplished via Terminal using the Command Line:
    DE-Construct a LaCie Little Bog Disk RAID Array
    From LaCie Technical Support on May 29, 2014
    IMPORTANT NOTE: The procedure below involves the use of the Terminal program. This program, if used incorrectly, can cause data loss, or other problems. Ensure everything is typed precisely to avoid data loss.
    Ensure an up to date backup exists prior to starting this process. It is important to ensure you do not have any other removable drives attached to the computer other than the one we are working with during this process.
    1. Open the program "Terminal". This is within the Utilities folder (MacHD --> Applications --> Utilities)
    In the terminal window, type:
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    This command will return a list of all the attached drives on the computer by a unique hardware identifier. (e.g. disk1, disk1s1). At this point, you will need to determine the correct identifier for the drive we are working with.
    2. If you are having problems getting the volume to dismount in Disk Utility, you can use the following command:
    diskutil unmount force (identifier)
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    3. One of the disk identifier entries may show the overall RAID set that was configured on the drives. If that is present, use the following command to remove this item:
    diskutil appleraid delete (identifier)
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    4. The following command will completely eradicate any remaining header information on the individual disks. This command would need to be done for each disk in the array:
    diskutil zerodisk (identifier)
    Please be very careful when running this command. This will fully wipe all data from the target drive(s). This should, however, clear off the inaccurate header indication on the drive that is incorrectly telling Disk Utility the drive is "broken".
    This process will start a long zero-out procedure on the drive. If you wish to test the hardware integrity of the drive mechanism, you can let this process complete to 100%. If this completes without errors, then we know the hardware of the drive mechanism is completely healthy. This will take several hours to finish on most systems.
    If you do not wish to wait, then you can usually interrupt this process (Control + C will abort this) after a minute or two. The important header information is one of the first things to be erased by this process, so even if interrupted, this command should still correct the problem.
    5. After everything is finished, you should be able to exit Terminal, and go back into the Disk Utility Application to re-configure the RAID array on the device.
    Hope this is helpful,
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  • 2010 iMac 2.93 i7 27" or 2011 2.8 i7 21.5" - which will suit better long-term?  I do a fair amount of audio, video editing and photoshop, but I have a limited budget.  What's going to give the best bang-for-buck for the next 3-5 yrs?

    I do a fair amount of audio, video editing and photoshop, but I have a limited budget.  What's going to give the best bang-for-buck for the next 3-5 yrs?  My current machine is a 13" Macbook unibody 2.4 Core 2 Duo w/ 4Gb Ram so it's time to move forward with more power and screen real estate!

    Hello, Jeff
    I could never edit on a 13" screen. I'm currently using a 17" MBP i7 Early 2011 as a fast replacement to my aged 20" Intel iMac.
    Both systems are not that far apart on stats and you will find that processing HD video will rely highly on the read/write to your storage. Myself, I'd be eye balling the 2011 for the Thunderbolt port so HD Video export/compression doesn't take forever! Currently processing a finished HD project for DVD uses at most 20% of my total CPU capacity. The FW800 drive is the big bottleneck! (I know I need at least a RAID to see a real speed boost).
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  • MSI GE70 2OE 2x ssd RAID 0 DON'T WORK PROPERLY

    Hi!,
    I have a problem with my raid 0, They are two Kingston mS200 60GB (http://www.pccomponentes.com/kingston_ssdnow_ms200_60gb_msata.html) running at 550MB/s read and write.
    This notebook supports up to 900MB / s in RAID mode.
    Well, I installed 2 m-sata ssd in the slots. I enter the BIOS, change the AHCI TO RAID  mode. Reboot, I go back into the bios. I set up two ssd, the raid is created. The bios shows me "Intel Raid 0 Volume" (111,80GB).
    Installed Windows 8.1, drivers etc ...
    I make a benchmak with the "AS SSD BENCHMARK" program.
    And the results are read "551.17 mb / s" and writing "179.10 mb / s".
    I have tried everything possible and get these very very bad results.

    Original devices? What devices?
    My stripe size is 128kb.
    I have used other benchmarks. Unfortunately mark the same results.
    I have also looked at the firmware of the SSD are updated. I tried one without ssd raid, and I get 200mb result of reading and writing 90MB.
    Something is wrong, why results so low?
    PS: Seen this way, the raid is making me x2 speed, but why the low result?

  • SSD Raid and other comments

    I spent the time to test a few situations for myself because there is no real life data that I can find on the internet which pertains to a real Mac user environment. These are only my finding and observations so I can finally stop ripping into my 2008 Mac Pro and changing things around constantly. Its not very scientific but to me I don't mind since the Mac user environment is judged upon feel as a large consideration. Also I'm not a high end power user to work with expensive software solutions. Just an average Mac user since '86, interested in speed and feel for speed.
    First: I wanted to utilize my 6 sata ports for hard drives because one, I test and need the extra hard drives and two, I was thinking of Raid 0 with SSD. So I researched and found nothing about using a sata optical connected to the ide controller in top compartment of the Mac Pro. So I decided to try anyway and purchased a Manhattan Sata 300 to ide converter. The only reason I bought this item is their web site said Windows, Mac and Linux compatible. I set J3 to cable select and connected the provided y-type power connector to the tiny controller card and the optical. I tried an LG CH08LS10 BD reader/DVD burner and a Samsung SH-B083. Without going into lots of detail everything I threw at the opticals worked. ASP shows ata connected device and of course nothing under sata.
    Second: I have read all there is to read about raid 0 and SSD for the boot drive.I have also tried every combination of SSD raid 0 and concluded only based upon observation and feel concerning speed that it made no sense to raid 0 SSD and lose a good sata port. Yes it does have an improvement on write speed but I don't store large files to write. I use a conventional scratch disk 7200 rpm or a 300 gig velociraptor. I'm believe one should match up the SSD to all other devices it will eventually interact. So I don't have enough room to raid conventional hard drives nor do I want to purchase a third party pci card. For those of you suggesting otherwise, I'm spending my time towards myself and the normal casual user. Here's some points to consider:
    1) I wanted to stop watch test only those real events I was familiar, finding that kind of data on the internet is basically nonexistent.
    2) finding optimal raid block size is highly important, yet difficult to find. Probably because to test all the sizes would be a huge PITA. So my test is simple. Make the raid0, choose the block size, install the OS and test. Open DMG files off a second hard drive I used Seagate 7200 rpm and feel the time it takes to open the dmg and mount on the desktop. With a single SSD its quite fast, usually 1 second. In raid zero if the block size is chosen incorrectly then the time will become quite long, being obviously slower. I'm not the expert so I wouldn't recommend the correct size but I think 16k is good. 32K becomes slow.
    3) Here are some stop watch times:
    warm restart: single SSD 39.1 secs raid 0 47.6 sec (not worth the loss of one sata port)
    install itunes 10.1.2 since this dmg does take a longish time: single SSD 1:47.0 min raid 0 1:27.6 (hardly worth the loss of one sata port)
    use itunes to add to a very large music library including artwork: single SSD 1:44.1 min raid 0 1:44.1 min
    using itunes to change equalizer to rock for the entire library: single SSD 1:17.9 min raid 0 1:16.8
    How to make itunes numbers faster , instead of placing the music folder on a conventional hard drive, I used a 300 gig Velociraptor ; place the music file on the SSD then itunes will really fly faster BUT what's the sense for a one time shot. Why use up the SSD space for a couple extra seconds.
    Lastly, I think raid 0 for conventional hard drives would be beneficial but once user gets into SSD the entire story changes. So I'm providing my experiences as a community service. I'm not looking for answer. I feel satisfied that I'm not going to raid my boot drive, a single SSD is fast enough to boot and launch applications. I'll store my data files on a scratch drive, a fast 7200 rpm hard drive wich matches up to my SSD drive. My SSD drives are X25M intel and they match well with fast hard drives. I don't need to raid hard drives because they'll write faster than the intel can do. 105 M/sec is good enough for me, the normal casual user.
    My boot drive is 19 gigs used. I have the normal amount of Applications installed . My music, downloads and movies are on a 7200 rpm scratch drive. Attaching my firewire externals matches up with my internals for speed within reason. Someone write something positive so I can close this post out.

    Another thought then I'm done with this thread.
    I posted a topic about the Radeon 5770 or 5870 working in the 2008 Mac Pro. I read all the stuff on the internet that it is doable. Although it is there was not ANY comments about what if a person clean installs with that card installed prior to. I did that test and was not totally satisfied that its bullet proof.
    I think that too many comments about things that supposedly work but will be unsupported needs to have more justification.
    Except if you think about it, each time I post some simplistic real world test and make comments to how I'm satisfied with performance there are only a small less than handful of people who bother to return a reply. A conclusion then follows that what ever one digests out there on the internet needs to be looked at in depth with some thought. Not just acceptance that the data is all inclusive. I'd never post any data where I thought it was 100% correct when in fact there is variability.
    A simple example would be do some research and try to find out exactly what programs use how many cores. There's some data but not enough to cover the large quantity of programs which exist for the Mac using either Snow Leopard or Leopard.
    One of my pet peeves is to do research and go to some forum, out of this one and read all the responses to some persons query. Its ridiculous the amount of band width wasted with replies that don't come close to answering the initial question.

  • Raid sets after reinstall

    Same issue
    CPU brand, model and speed: Intel i7 2600K
    Motherboard model: MSI P67A-GD80 E7672IMS V10.0
    Memory brand, type/speed, size, number of sticks: Corsair Venguance 2 x 4GB 1333
    Video card brand, chipset type, memory size: Nvidia GTX580 1536MB
    Hard drive(s) brand, size, type, speed: Intel SSD 80GB X25 G2, 2 x Hitachi 2TB raid-0, 2 x Seagate 1,5TB raid-0
    Any other peripheral cards and devices: n/a
    Operating system and version: Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
    Power Supply Unit brand and output in watts and DC output (amps): Antec Cp-850
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    Well I figured out what went wrong. After configuring the raid sets the controller was set back to AHCI mode. Raid info is retained on the disks so that worked fine, until I reinstalled without setting it back to RAID mode.
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  • Set tolerance limits in invoice block

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  • Vista won't install on a RAID set. ***SOLVED***

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    Quote from: FrogmanTM on 09-August-09, 05:39:36
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  • Mac Pro (2009) RAID Card - Can't create RAID Set

    Hi Everyone,
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    Thanks,
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    Manualy erased all 4 the drives and it worked instantly. System is now initializing the volume :-)
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  • Mac Pro 2009 Raid Set Lost after Hard Reboot

    We have a newer Nehalem based Mac Pro with a 2009 Black Apple Hardware Raid card.  The Hard Drive Configuration is: 4 x 2TB Western Digital drives setup as a Raid 1+0 array providing 4TB of space with what we believed to be optimal performance and redundancy.  We had two volumes / partitions configured on the array, one 120GB for the OS and the remaining 3.8TB for data. 
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    When the server came back on it would not boot up.  We were greeting with the Folder with a Queston Mark.  We booted from the Mac 10.6 Snow leopard Server Disk and opened up Apples Raid utility software.  Much to our shock the Raid Set and the two Volumes were not shown in the Utility.  However all 4 of the drives were listed and all being shown as Green light good status, but listed as "Roaming".  We weren't sure what to do, the volumes weren't accesible since they didn't exist, the Raid set wasn't there, there was no way to run something like Data Rescue Recovery software.  We tried calling Apple and have to wait until they open this morning.  After looking online at various forums we came accross this problem with no solutions.  Most of the people with the problems had the older 2006 Blue Raid card, and this appeared to be a common issue amoung others with the older card.  I decided to try and re-create the Raid 1+0 set.  However as soon as I did that I was prompted by Raid Utility that the drives I was selecting to use for the Raid set were already a part of another raid set and using them would delete the data on the set.  I obviously canceled the process. Crazy enough the system knows the drives belong to a Raid set but doesn't realize it should know what the raid set information is.
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    I haven't lost data, but in my 2010 Mac Pro with 2009-vintage Apple RAID card, it has this Really Annoying Habit of constantly losing Disk 3 (the spare) in my 4x2 TB internal RAID5 array whenever I have to do a hard reboot.
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  • This disk doesn't contain an EFI system partition. If you want to start up your computer with this disk or include it in a RAID set, back up your data and partition this disk.

    As stated above. I get this when I try to resize my HD. Was having issues with BootCamp so I removed it and got this.
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    the same problem...
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  • Creating a mirrored raid set with a hard drive that already has data on it.

    I have a hard drive that I keep my photos on, and want to create a mirrored raid set that includes this drive, with its data, and another drive.  How can I do this without erasing the drive with my photos on them?  I am running 10.7.5 if that matters.
    Thanks for any help.

    Creating a Mirrored RAID reformats the drive and loads a substantial RAID driver and some tables onto it. When completed, the drive is inherently a member of a RAID set, and will continue to be so even if moved to another Mac.
    because of this, you cannot create a RAID directly on a standard drive that contains data already in any reasonable, risk-free way.
    To amplify what The Hatter has said above, Mirrored RAID is not Backup. Mirrored RAID only increases mean time to repair to keep a drive failure from becoming a Data Disaster. You still need a Backup. Mirrored RAID does not protect you from deletions from user error, crazy software, or "just because".
    I run a mirrored RAID in my Home Server, which contains all the Users files for everyone in the Household. And I also recognize (after being burned by it) that Mirrored RAID is helpful, but not a sufficient Backup by itself. I back up the Users Drive automatically to an External drive using Time Machine. [So what I am advising is not just theoretical, I am living what I am advising.]
    With WD Black 1TB  and other very good drives in the under US$100 range, there is really no reason NOT to invest in several drives for such an undertaking.

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