Best storage system for my needs?

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Sgt_Strider

Gawd
Joined
Oct 29, 2003
Messages
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After doing a bit of research and asking some questions, I think I might have to modify my plan. Originally I was thinking of getting 2x WD 640GB AAKS with a dedicated RAID card like the Areca 1200 and put it in a RAID 0 setup. However, I'm starting to think that I might not benefit from the speed increase. I heard RAID 0 will make a big difference for me if the files that I transfer and or use are large. If I move a lot of small files say about 50MB or smaller then I should stick with a single drive. In that case I was thinking of getting a 150GB Velociraptor. I mainly use the computer for working with Photoshop CS3 and Adobe Lightroom to process my DSLR's RAW files. I work with tons of RAW files, but they're small compared to video files. At most, my RAW files are 11.5MB each. My new Nikon D300 should push file sizes to maybe 13-14MB each. I also do a bit of light gaming and just started encoding videos for my Sony PSP. I'm also a bit worried that saving any files on a RAID 0 array puts my files at risk. It's possible that a RAID 0 array can break on me at anytime and if I forgot to save my work on my 1TB backup drive then I'm screwed. I say I'm probably going to use the machine more for photo editing and gaming than encoding videos. Which setup would be best for my need? I wouldn't say money is not an issue, but my budget for such a system is about $400.
 
You don't have a real need to use a hardware RAID controller for something as simple as two drives in RAID0 - any decent Intel ICH9R/10R controller should do fine enough, and in some respects, gets roughly equal performance in RAID0 than with hardware controllers - their main advantage lies in RAID5 where complex parity needs to be calculated.
 
Agreed with the above. In running my own benchmarks with HD Tach/HD tune I get about 60MB/s reads using 7200 RPM Seagate 7200.10 500GB drives. If I put two of those drives in a RAID 0 I get about 90MB/s. I think a single velociraptor will probably perform better at 10k RPMs. Using RAID at home using low-end/cheap desktop components is not quite as reliable as I'd like and can be glitchy, especially software RAID.
I think you would be happy with a single velociraptor. Either way you go a single drive failure and you will lose files, so always keep backups of your important stuff!
 
I have a 2x1tb raid 0 and then I have my raptor 150 (not velociraptor), when doing work files 13mb and over, the raid does feel snappier. Game loading makes no difference however.
 
RAID 5 has alot of overhead for calculating parity. If you have a software raid controller, that processing will be done onyour computer's CPU. RAID 5 will however give you some protection as the array can be rebuilt if one disk fails, 2 or more failures, and you lose the array. It also requires at least 3 hard drives I believe to work.
 
If your main work is Lightroom/RAW processing in general, that's not even very HD intensive. Hardly worthwhile going RAID 0 for that IMO. I also would definitely not get an expensive RAID controller with just a simple 2 drive setup in either RAID 0 or RAID 1.

If you need a lot of storage space and work a lot with photos, you need redundancy more so than the small speed boost you'd see with RAID 0. Depending on budget/capacity needs, I would go with Velociraptor boot drive and 3 WD640s in RAID5 where all the photos are stored. (This is my wife's setup for the same purpose, Lightroom and Photoshop).

I used to have a big grudge against RAID 5 using built-in mobo controllers but have recently setup 2 systems with ICH10R with WD640s and Seagate 7200.11 terabyte drives. The performance is impressive compared to what I'm used to from a couple years ago. Either current processors or so fast the overhead is barely noticeable, the actual RAID controllers are more efficient, or the new drives are better designed for this purpose, OR more likely all the above.

When I have time I can post some more comprehensive benchmark results but off the top of my head average transfer rates are over 100MB/sec and access times under 13ms for 3 new drives in RAID5 on ICH10R.
 
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