So by saying that does anyone have any suggestions on which high performance HD I should buy?
I've been seeing these SSD, SCSI, SAS, the newer Raptor Drives, and plenty others but really don't know. Now I see the prices are completely insane for some of these...like $1000 for 74 gigs is just WOW.
As for a budget I won't spend over a grand for a hard drive.
I use my computer 16 hours a day doing tons of video editing, CAD, gaming, and various other programs my children use for school. Also as of late I was thinking of starting a website.
What do you think FordGT? I really need capacity. Between home movies, the weddings I shoot, and the music I already have i'm maxing out the 2 - 250's I have (which are raid 0).
Well if you want capacity, the most economical way would be to get a couple of 1TB drives and call it a day, but obviously they won't be the fastest drives you will find. For under $1000, the truth is you can't have huge capacity and the fastest speed at the same time.
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And a RAID5 HDD controller. I would use the two 250 GBs for the OS and apps and put all your unique content on the 3 TB RAID5 array. You'll be set for a long time and you could survive a single HDD failure to boot. I would recommend getting a HDD controller that supports a hot spare so you'd only have 2 TB accessible but can recover from two HDD failures (albeit not at the exact same time).
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Unfortunately, seems most customers are asking for HD nowadays.
But thanks a ton for the help. I started doing some research and just as you said FordGT I think I'll be getting a nice dedicated Raid Controller card.
And a RAID5 HDD controller. I would use the two 250 GBs for the OS and apps and put all your unique content on the 3 TB RAID5 array.
RAID5 has terrible write performance - it's not something you generally want to use for things like video editing, databases, or anything else that demands a lot of disk writes. Consider keeping working copies and scratch space on a non-RAID5 volume, then moving to RAID5 for long term storage.
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I wouldn't mess with SAS/SCSI/SSD hard drives though. Maybe RAID01 or RAID10 would be best but they aren't efficient on space.
The way I look at it, an instance where write operations exceed read operations is next to non-existant. Like in video editing, how much time is spent actually modifying the video compared to viewing it to make sure all looks good? The only exception to that really is backups which occur rarely (write on intervals and read on demand)...
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RAID6 is usually even worse - RAID10 is a nice balance of speed and redundancy, but at the cost of less efficient disk usage than 5/6.
I wouldn't mess with SAS/SCSI/SSD hard drives though. Maybe RAID01 or RAID10 would be best but they aren't efficient on space.
Agreed. Not remotely worth the money, unless you really need every last bit of speed you can get. Especially if high capacity is necessary.
The way I look at it, an instance where write operations exceed read operations is next to non-existant. Like in video editing, how much time is spent actually modifying the video compared to viewing it to make sure all looks good? The only exception to that really is backups which occur rarely (write on intervals and read on demand)...
Viewing video is child's play, relatively speaking - even Blu-ray's max bit rate (1080p) is only 40Mbps, a fraction of what a single disk can do. I have heard of uncompressed 1080p to the tune of ~0.5Gbps, but I seriously doubt anyone using consumer grade gear is going to be messing with something like that Anyway, the point is that there aren't really many scenarios where you care about reading a video faster than the normal bitrate. And, if you do happen to care about fast reads (ie applying filters or what have you), you probably care just as much about writing back to disk.
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The reason that RAID-5 lags in performance is the computational overhead associated with doing the parity/checksum calculations. You can overcome this performance bottleneck through the use of a dedicated RAID Controller vs using the onboard southbridge which uses the CPU.
A 2TB RAID5 controller and drive sample configuration for under $1000 is here:
The reason that RAID-5 lags in performance is the computational overhead associated with doing the parity/checksum calculations. You can overcome this performance bottleneck through the use of a dedicated RAID Controller vs using the onboard southbridge which uses the CPU.
Exactly why I wouldn't dream of using RAID5 on-board.
Hmm, a lot of money can be saved by getting the 7200.11 drives verses the enterprise drives. If you intend to leave the computer running most of the time, it would be worth investing in enterprise parts; otherwise, I say the non-ES parts are reliable enough to outlive most of the other components in a computer.
Accusys? I never heard of that manufacturer.
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They've been around for a while, If you want to get into enterprise level controllers you're looking at a much larger cost.
The original poster said something about a $1000 cap, so thats what I went for.
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Ya $1000 bucks is plenty but that was just for the HD's if you guys know of a great controller please show me the way.
So hows this...since I make backups of every single thing I do on external HD's to get great performance couldn't I just get a dedicated Raid Controller and buy a few 10K rpm HD's and raid0 them?
Yeah, you could go for RAID0. If performance is all you want, it might be worth looking at SSDs. They are more expensive, have hardly any capcity but they are a great deal faster than HDDs.
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I'll have to agree with FordGT on one item, and disagree on two others.
First: Agree: Utilization of the Segate Barracuda 7200.11 (AS series) drives over the Enterprise Class ES.2 (NS Series) drives would save over $80/drive. In your implementation the AS series drives would do just as well, with the caveats to follow on the disagreements section and additional.
Second: Disagree: Utilization of the Highpoint controller. I've had some OK, and some very bad experiences with Highpoint products. This is Highly objective on my part, and not a actual disagreement with FordGT as his product may work perfectly well for him, and may well work very well for you, but in my experience the Highpoints have a spotty record at best and may not be the best for you (unless you're running a Apple Platform, which is where they resided as a vendor). Having said that, the Accusys controller in my sample configuration wouldn't be my first choice. They also are OK, they're kind of an Tiawanese OEM for lots of folks, but do have a good service record. For the RAID controller or manufacturer that I'd recommend, it would most likely be LSI Logic (they bought my first choice of Mylex). For a cached 4 port SATA/ single port SAS SFF8087 with 128MB of cache I'd recommend the LSI00144. Very good bang for the buck, fast and multiple RAID support levels at or below $350.
Third: Disagree: In your utilization it should be NOT be OK to run a straight RAID 0. In this I am assuming your External Backups, but this isn't enough given some of the other parameters provided by you. Which is to say, 16 hours/day usage. In my sample configuration I gave you a system that even in the event of a HDD failure, you could continue work. A RAID 0 does not give you this option. In a case of a HDD failure you would have to proccure a replacement drive (1-5 days), rebuild the array (.5-1 day), then restore from the external drive (another .5-1day), and this is assuming you have enough near line storage (external HDD) that can hold that much data (unlikely given the 2TB cap of the provided sample)! I don't know how critical your work schedule is, but a possible 7 day outage is not something I'd like to contemplate based upon a single HDD failure.
Caveats:
1. You have to have a chassis/PSU combination that will support many HDDs if you want to do all of this internally. Preferably something with at least 6 HDD bays.
2. You won't really see the performace throughput increase of 10K or 15K drives unless you are running a much larger SAS or SCSI or even iSCSI array. I would recommend the 7200 speed drives and a good controller over a couple of RAID 0 10K drives. Better bang for the buck.
3. If you can, a reconfiguration of your base system for the following scenerio would be approaching optimal, given the information at hand.
A. Retain attachment of your present 250GBx2 drives through the onboard SATA connectors and configure them in a RAID 1. Install your OS and applications on them.
B. Install the RAID controller of your choice and connect 3-4 1TB 7200 drives to it. A PCI-Ex4 controller is better than a PCI-Ex1 controller, for throughput. You'll notice that most RAID controllers are PCI-X64 controllers, but most Desktop MBs do not support this slot. It is on this controller that you have the option of doing a RAID 5, a RAID 5 +Hotspare, a RAID 0+1 or a RAID 1+0 (RAID10) with RAID 10 preferable.
C. It is on the second RAID, whichever way you chose to go, that you'll store your data, and most likely your temp space for editing as it will be the faster for both.
There are several different takes on this, thus the differing recommendations. If you need to go beyond 2TB, then you'll want to look at SAS External with SATA-II enclosures, but thats a different parametrical can of worms. If this is a hobby, then I've overstated the systems criteria, if not, then you'll have to make the determination on the trade offs that you're willing to accept. I'm assuming that you're at least a semi-professional based upon your HDD budget.
But you know what they say about assumptions.....
Good luck!
Gerritt
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I'm not saying Highpoint is the best because they are far from it. I had a lot of time consuming issues with it but ultimately got it resolved one way or another (all of which related to trying to boot to the card on server hardware). Of the choices available (without going over $200) Highpoint has the right RAID levels and the best ratings of people who own them. If you want to spend more, by all means find a better card by LSI, Adaptec, or Promise.
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Ford,
I was very careful in stating that my recommendation against Highpoint was my own, and that the product could and has worked well for others. I went out of my way to say that the Highpoint recomendation could work. On the low end, I agree that Promise has several options for SATA RAID, and that Adaptec has some excellent SCSI RAID options. It is in the mid-line that Accusys seems to have an advantage, and the mid to high end that LSI seems to have the advantage at least as applies to inexpensive SATA solutions.
I also intimated that I have a more high end (and thus high expense) approach to some of these solutions, and that others could work just as well in a given environment.
In your favor, the cost savings between the two types of Seagate HDDs could easily pay for the higher end cached RAID controller.
Best regards,
Gerritt
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They look excellant. Good reviews, nice layout, lots of RAID level support. I really don't see anything not to like except the price (I don't say that often).
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when i bought them they had them $50.- dollars off, each. $300.- is really pushing the envelope but $250.- is definitally worth it.
i just performed an online raid expansion...succesfull. awesome feature.
no reboot, reset, etc, no hassle, whatever. just hookup a new disk and and run the config tool.
Anyway, the point is that there aren't really many scenarios where you care about reading a video faster than the normal bitrate. And, if you do happen to care about fast reads (ie applying filters or what have you), you probably care just as much about writing back to disk.
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