RAID0 plans, recommendations?

[Cerulean]

I currently have a 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 and I plan on buying three more of these puppies to put into one RAID, and mainly for the performance increase.

Do you have any recommendations? What if something went wrong and I lost my data? Is it worth the risk? What's the best way to do this?

 

[Logan321]

No raid is a backup solution. Ideally you should use an external HD or NAS to backup your data regardless of whether your HDs are in a raid configuration or not.

You will see performance increase with multiple HDs in raid but if you're hoping to run a raid-5 configuration (3/4 of set is data, 1/4 is parity, any drive dies and you keep your data by replacing one drive) you should look into getting a hardware raid controller card.

Raid 0+1 is 2HDs in a stripe set and 2HDs mirroring, gives 50% capacity of all drives but offers decent reliability (one HD dies and you can replace it without losing your data)

Raid 0 with 4 HDs is probably unwise. Any problem with any of the drives and your whole data set is gone, no way to recover it. Adding more HDs to raid0 increases your chances of failure.

 

[DonDon]

What he said.

I run a 4 X 30 GIG SSD setup into a Perc 5i controller. I mainly decided on that setup because of the slow write speeds of the then current bargain SSDs. I keep my data on a NAS with RAID 5 which gets backed up fairly regularly.

Running with 4 drives will only increase the read and write speeds. It will not help with the access times. While it will benchmark faster, the real life performance increase may not be very dramatic.

Unless you really need the storage space, a couple of 150 gig Raptors in RAID 0 may be a better solution. Just use the existing drive for storage.

Don

 

[Youri Carma]

I used 4X ST350410AS perpendicular Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA2 250 GB 16MB Cache in RAID 0
One terra hell of fast, cheap silent MTFs

Use Acronis to make regular Backups of your system and Files on a single Backup disk


Good News for us Tweakers: Acronis Universal Restore.

- Migration from RAID too another Non-Raid HD is possible!

Dear Mr. Santiago Guzman / Technical Crew of Acronis,

From my own experiment, I can confirm that the following conclusion sentence in the manual of Acronis Universal restore is not true:

"As appears from the above, a bootable system migration from RAID to HDD and vise versa is impossible."

From my experience when I restored the clone from Hardware A residing on three RAID Discs in striping mode, via Universal Restore to another different Hardware B with only a single HDD.

The HAL-less-clone image booted perfectly on the destination platform on a single HDD, eventhough the source image was made on a machine with three striping RAID discs. Not a single driver was added on the destination machine, the default HAL driver found the default onboard SATA HDD and booted sweetly and swiftly.

All the items above the sentence could be left out and the sentence should read:

"Acronis Universal Restore can make a bootable system migration from RAID to HDD, RAID to RAID, HDD to RAID and HDD to HDD, provided that when using a HDD to RAID or RAID to RAID, the destination drivers of the Raid are included in the restoration image."

With compliments to your Software!



Somehwere in the Manual of Acronis True Image Echo Enterprise Server with Universal Restore
===========================================================================



What is Acronis Universal Restore?

The most obvious way of cloning a Windows system is to deploy its image to a different computer.However, the deployment will not be a success if the target hardware is incompatible with the most critical drivers included into the image. The restored system may turn unbootable because startup drivers and components, used by the source system, cannot operate on a different motherboard, processor etc.
Note
• Using Microsoft System Preparation Tool (sysprep) does not solve this problem, because Sysprep can replace drivers only for Plug-and-Play devices (sound cards, network adapters, video cards etc.). As for system HAL and boot device driver, they must be identical in the source and target computers (see Microsoft Knowledge Base, articles 302577 and 216915).
Acronis Universal Restore technology provides an efficient solution for hardware-independent system restoration by replacing the crucial HAL and hard disk controller drivers.
Note
• Acronis Universal Restore does not conflict with Microsoft System Preparation Tool (sysprep). If you got accustomed to using Sysprep, you can use both tools on the same system.
Acronis Universal Restore is an optional program feature. It should be purchased separately and installed from a separate .msi setup file. Acronis Universal Restore can only be installed on a computer where at least one of the following Acronis components is installed:
• Acronis True Image Agent for Windows
• Acronis True Image (local version)
• Bootable Media Builder.

How to use
You can perform the following procedure either locally or remotely, using Acronis True Image Management Console.

• Boot the target computer into Acronis recovery environment from the bootable media, or RIS server, or using F11.
• Start the recovery procedure and select the image of the source computer for restoration.
• You can specify Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and hard disk controller drivers to be used by the restored system and/or provide a path to a driver repository on the network.Hence, Acronis Universal Restore uses three sources for drivers search: the list of user-specified (enforced) drivers, driver repository, and the Windows default driver storage folders (in the image being restored). The program will find the most suitable drivers of all available and install them into the restored system. However, the user-defined drivers will have the priority. They will be installed, with appropriate warning, even if the program finds the better driver.The Windows default driver storage folders are determined in the registry key SOFTWARE -> Microsoft -> Windows -> Current version -> DevicePath. Generally, it is WINDOWS/inf folder.
• You can optionally disable Plug and Play setup after applying Acronis Universal Restore.Acronis Universal Restore relies on built-in plug-and-play discovery and configuration process to handle hardware differences in devices that are not critical for the system start, such as video, audio, USB. Windows takes control over this process during the logon phase, and if some of the new hardware is not detected, you will have a chance to install drivers for it later manually. However, in most situations to make servers operational ASAP the administrator does not need video/audio/USB drivers. Disabling the plug-and-play configuration will reduce the system start procedure to booting Windows and configuring network cards.
• When the restore process runs Acronis True Image will:
- detect the machine type and install appropriate driver for HAL
- detect IDE and SCSI controllers and install appropriate drivers. If no appropriate drivers are found in all three above sources, the user will be prompted to browse the following locations for the drivers: (Network share drive, Floppy disk, CD drive)

• The machine reboots.
• Windows takes control and initiates the usual first-start process.

Note
• The recovery procedure can proceed under Windows as well (for example, if the operating system is loaded from the C: drive, the system partition of the other computer can be restored from an image to the D: drive). In this case, the user prompt for driver search on Network-Floppy-CD will not be issued. If a compatible driver cannot be found, Windows will suggest to ignore it or cancel restoration.

Using Acronis Universal Restore in virtual environment
Virtual machine technologies provide a powerful tool to help accelerate the development, testing, deployment and support of PC applications.
Using Acronis True Image Enterprise Server/ Workstation with Acronis Universal Restore you can perform real-to-virtual and virtual-to-real computer migration in the same way as with real systems.If the virtual hard drive uses SCSI controller, you should provide appropriate drivers while performing system restore to the virtual machine. For example, the widespread VMware environment requires Buslogic or LSI logic drivers. Use drivers bundled with your virtual machine software or download the latest drivers versions from the software manufacturer website.

Hints on using Acronis Universal Restore

• The system recovered by Acronis Universal Restore may not start if the partition structure in the image or the target disk partitioning does not coincide with that of the source disk. As a result, the loader, restored from the image, will point to the wrong partition and the system will not boot or will malfunction.Such might be the case if you:
- image not the entire source disk, but only the selected partitions. Keep in mind, that the source disk may have a hidden maintenance partition created by the computer vendor. Therefore, if you check each partition for backup instead of checking the disk, this hidden partition will not be included into the image.
- restore not the entire source disk, but only the selected partitions. In some cases, especially if your system resides on other than the first partition, this can confuse the loader and prevent the restored system from startup
- image the system residing on the RAID array and restore the system to a RAID array with different configuration.
To avoid the problem, we recommend that you image and restore the entire system disk and use the identical RAID configuration on the source and the target computer.
• As appears from the above, a bootable system migration from RAID to HDD and vise versa is impossible.
• When migrating from RAID to RAID, be sure to provide an appropriate driver for the RAID controller, otherwise a basic HDD driver will be installed.
• Acronis Universal Restore option is not available when restoring dynamic disks and volumes.

Benefits
• Acronis Universal Restore can be used "after the fact": it is not necessary to create an image with the option, you can restore any image to different hardware.
• Acronis Universal Restore allows the user to exactly specify drivers during restore, enabling their maximum compatibility with the hardware.
• Acronis Universal Restore does not strip security identifier (SID) and user profile settings. This means that you will not need to re-join your domain or re-map network user profiles after a restore.
• Acronis Universal Restore supports a driver repository to centrally store all drivers so users do not need to go looking for them.

 

[SonataSys]

I hope this helps you out.

I edit video and lots of large images, so I'm dealing with many huge files all the time. Anything that improves disk throughput and increases storage capacity is paramount. After moving from a single hard drive to a RAID-0 configuration, my final rendering and overall processing times dropped almost in half!

I have been running with two RAID-0 arrays using typical WD 7200RPM RE3 disks for over 4 years without a single failure. For back-up, I usually burn critical project files to a set of DVD-RW discs once or twice each week upon reaching major milestones. At the end of a project, I burn the final renderings to DVD-R and then wipe it off my drive array entirely.

I would suggest a computer case with front-loading hot-swap bays, so you can easily slide your drives in and out quickly. This is also a nice way to boot multiple OS environments quickly and in complete isolation.

I recently purchased a pair of WD VelociRaptor 300GB disks in RAID-0 configuration that spin at 10K, and this dropped my rendering time down another 30%. Another interesting thing to note, these VelociRaptor disks are extremely quick-- a single disk performs nearly at the same level as my older, 7200RPM RAID-0 configuration.

I only wish WD would produce a 1TB VelociRaptor...

 

[Youri Carma]

3X ST350410AS perpendicular Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA2 250 GB 16MB Cache in RAID 0 TESTED: 294 MB/s

I still have to test 4X ST350410AS RAID 0.

Theoretical 3 Gbit/s = 375 MB/s.

Will I reach this limit of SATII 375 MB/s with these 4X old Seagates ST350410AS in RAID 0? We will see.


I think the best buy for your buck is this especially in Movie rendering business with the fast 32MB Cache:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS, 500GB, SATA2, 32MB, 7200, 3.5"

Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3500320NS, 500GB, SATA 3.0-Gb/s 32MB, 7200, 3.5"

The Newest 500 GB series have 16 MB wonder which is faster of these four?
Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500410AS, 500GB, SATA2, 16MB, 7200, 3.5"

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500418AS, 500GB, SATA2, 16MB, 7200, 3.5"

Would prefer the 32MB cache myself if I had to buy.

Best Buck and Fastest Config: 4 X 7200.11 ST3500320AS, 500GB, 32MB in RAID 0 to reach SATA II Max. of 375 MB/s!

For Backup buy an extra 500GB or Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3750528AS, 750GB, SATA2, 32MB, 7200, 3.5"

Make a CLONEDISK with Acronis FROM ANY RAID 0 Config. to a SINGLE DISK which is ALWAYS BOOTABLE in case of RAID 0 or MBR problems.

Use SATA II or External SATA II to make your CLONE backup time fast.

Disconnect the Single Disk after the backup CLONING work. Remember this single disk is simply bootable as single disk with all of your file backup included.

Later you always can put back this clone on your RAID 0 Sys.

The size of your Backup Cloning Disk is depending on the Size of your original config and file size of couse.

CLONEDISK only Clones what is written on your original RAID 0 not the empty space.


Hope this info adds somtin for you folks?

 

[DonDon]

3X ST350410AS perpendicular Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA2 250 GB 16MB Cache in RAID 0 TESTED: 294 MB/s

I still have to test 4X ST350410AS RAID 0.

Theoretical 3 Gbit/s = 375 MB/s.

Will I reach this limit of SATII 375 MB/s with these 4X old Seagates ST350410AS in RAID 0? We will see.

SNIP!


Hope this info adds somtin for you folks?

The bandwidth for SATA in independant for each channel. It is not shared in any way like IDE. So 4 X SATA II drives should get about 12 GB/sec. You will of course run into controller limitations long before that though. My Perc 5i seems to cap about 400 MB/sec. I have seen some SSD setups into ICH10R pulling down 600 MB/sec.

SonataSys, when you do your video rendering, are you reading from one array, and writing back to the other?

Don

 

[Youri Carma]

I have seen some SSD setups into ICH10R pulling down 600 MB/sec.

Cool

 

[SonataSys]

SonataSys, when you do your video rendering, are you reading from one array, and writing back to the other?

Yes, the first RAID-0 VelociRaptor pair (600GB) is where I boot and run my applications from, and where I capture and work with my current/active working set of video/audio files. That's just enough room to work with 120 minutes of content. I store an entire project and usually render multiple versions of edited material using my larger and slower 2TB RAID-0 pair, including the final NTSC/PAL ISO DVD burn images.

For a single typical 90-minute standard definition DVD project my total disk requirements can grow to around 400GB. After the final edits are in place, the only files I usually keep stored in the larger array are the final NTSC/PAL ISO burn images that usually are 6 to 8GB each; everything else is burned on DVD and archived to make room for the next project.

It would be nice to have higher capacity, dedicated external RAID storage, possibly RAID 0+1, so I can keep everything near, fast and safe. However, that's not in my budget for the work I do, so I get by with the two RAID-0 sets on my workstation.