Raid Schmaid ???

[mark4man]

People,

Will a RAID array help me with digital audio recording? I currently run SONAR2 (multitrack recording software) & XP Home on a Primary (ATA) drive; & record my audio data onto a dedicated Secondary (ATA) drive, both 7200 rpm's w/ 8MB cache's.

What exactly is RAID; & how would it aid the audio datastream?

Thanks,

mark4man

 

[defakto]

Raid 0 would help you as a scratch disc for working with the file. It would give you faster load times loading up very large audio files and faster save times. I wouldn't use it for anything more than a scratch file disc setup though, definately no storage on it.

 

[drizzt81]

maybe you can describe 'digital audio recording' a bit better. Does it require to read/ write lots of data sequentially? Or does editing mean that you will have a large number of random accesses?
If you are considering RAID0 vs. your described setup (i.e. one boot/ programs drive and a scratch disk) I would recommend your setup, since it seems to take advantage of inherent knowledge about how data will be accessed that RAID does not have.

 

[mark4man]

defakto & drizzt81...

Thanks very much.


drizzt81,

What does it do for throughput?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


defakto,

Does it require to read/ write lots of data sequentially? Or does editing mean that you will have a large number of random accesses?

Actually, both. Serial datastream for recording/playback, RA (& RAM access) for editing (& CPU for processing.) You hit it right on the money.

I'm really thinking of moving to SONAR5, which is now a true 64-Bit DAW developed specifically to run on Windows XP Pro 64-Bit with a dual core CPU. With it's 64-Bit DP FP core & mixing code, SONAR5 provides for RAM access up to a frickin' TB; & also allows for more of the CPU's registers to be utilized.

Half of the guys going over are swearing by RAID; & the other half are saying not necessary...2 different camps. I though maybe I could get some better insight in places like this & Tom's Hdwe. Guide, etc.

Thanks again,

mark4man

 

[jinderb]

I though maybe I could get some better insight in places like this & Tom's Hdwe. Guide, etc.

Check this out:Raid Help and [H]ardocp

 

[drizzt81]

If your current system is limited by sequential write and read speed, raid-0 will help you, since it increases that, however, RAID-0 can increase your random access time, sine both spindles need to be moved in order to start reading/ writing data.

SR has a good raid guide:
http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.html

Let me quote this

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/singleLevel0.html

Random Read Performance: Very good; better if using larger stripe sizes if the controller supports independent reads to different disks in the array.

Random Write Performance: Very good; again, best if using a larger stripe size and a controller supporting independent writes.

Sequential Read Performance: Very good to excellent.

Sequential Write Performance: Very good.

Recommended Uses: Non-critical data (or data that changes infrequently and is backed up regularly) requiring high speed, particularly write speed, and low cost of implementation. Audio and video streaming and editing; web servers; graphic design; high-end gaming or hobbyist systems; temporary or "scratch" disks on larger machines.

Also, considereing 1 drive vs RAID and access times:
http://faq.storagereview.com/SingleDriveVsRaid0

In regards to the specific question of whether a pair of drives in RAID 0 can degrade performance as compared to a single identical drive, other than the unlikely CPU example above the answer is "probably not." Some may say that access time can be increased (worse) due to a specific read (or write) requiring both heads to seek to their portion of the data, creating the result that average access time will be slower. However, this only really applies when accessing large numbers of small files as larger files will benefit from the improved STR. Unless the configured stripe size is too small, most of the small reads will access only one drive.

which makes RAID appealing, however they go on to say

Finally, it is sometimes beneficial to use the identical drives individually rather than in a RAID array because it is then possible for each drive to individually serve a different process. For example, one drive could handle paging to disk, and the other could handle other disk I/O needed by applications. Using a media example, one drive could read audio/video and the other could write the modified result. This would be faster than having a RAID array do both reads and writes, because individual drives could read/write linearly, eliminating the need to move the actuators back and forth between the area of disk being written to and the area being read from.

so, it really depends on your application and how you its disk accesses work. If you are able to configure it to use one drive as source, the other as temp/ destination, it is likely that this is faster than RAID0. If this is not possible, RAID-0 may be a better choice.

 

[defakto]

Don't most audio apps read as much of the file into ram as they can before you even start working with it?

I don't use them but that was my impression of them.

 

[mikeblas]

Don't most audio apps read as much of the file into ram as they can before you even start working with it?

I haven't studied it deeply, but Adobe Audition appears to load everything it can into memory. If it runs low on physical memory, it will notice before it starts to cause page faults and spool what it can away.

It is always writing large data to disk for undo, though -- if I apply a file-wide filter, it is saving a copy of the file before the filter is applied. So even though it tries to be very efficient about using memory, having a drive that's as fast as possible doesn't hurt.

 

[defakto]

So this really would be one of the few situations where raid0 would benifit the orginal poster then most likely.

 

[mikeblas]

So this really would be one of the few situations where raid0 would benifit the orginal poster then most likely.

Assuming the access is mostly sequential, I guess so. But I'd still differ with there being only a few situations where RAID 0 is useful.