Highend3d Artists Discussion Forums

Need help with mass storage and realtime editing

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vyder 2003-06-08 23:43:21 UTC #1

hi guys..just need some opinions on a few things.

right now i am an intermediate 3d modeler. i have a decent entry level computer (dual athlons). i have recently finished with school and have started to take on some freelance animation and motion graphics jobs. currently i have a 60gig IDE drive which has suited my needs before the freelancing jobs.

what i wanted to ask basically is what new AFFORDABLE system can i implement for mass media storage and editing. I want somethign a little faster than my current hard drive that is reliable and durable. i have been doing some research on this topic and i would like to share with you some options that i have found.

implementing a RAID system (i know very little about doing this). my motherboard doesnt have a built on RAID, can i buy RAID cards? also how fast is RAID as compared to scsi and fire wire? is it efficient?
implementing a scsi system - once again i know very little about this. all i know is that it is the fastest and best system for real-time editing, but is HELLA expensive. i doubt i can afford a mass media/ real -time editing scsi system at the moment. what are the reliable brandnames here?
fire wire - i hear that this has decent speeds and is very affordable right now. can this do real-time editing? or at least near real-time..doesnt have to be perfect. if fire wire is the key, what brands of hardware should i get for an add-on card and what hard drive should i get?
USB 2.0? - is this a fast system? people have said that usb 2.0 is fast but is it reliable? what brandnames should i get if this is a good system?

gmask 2003-06-09 04:14:39 UTC #2

Whatever you get wether IDE or SCSI a raid will defiantley give you the best performance for editting but may not be neccessary with SCSI. SCSI and IDE run necck and neck but on the highend side of things SCSI wins out.

Are you looking for uncompressed editting?

Personally I haven't adapted to firewire yet but it is capable of being used for editting..

USB fo-ge-da-bout-it!

vyder 2003-06-09 04:27:33 UTC #3

hey g,

let me see if i can help out a bit more. i dont think that i will be doing uncompressed editing as most of my movies are compressed with one codec or another. however, since there are going to be a large amount of images from renders, i need space to hold that stuff. i mainly will be using adobe after effects. i hope that helps a little.

also, when u say raid..what specifics are u talking about? do i have to get those new IDE raid hard drives? the ones with the fastest ATA ?

also, do they have external RAID's? i am not sure how much space my internall tower can handle. i dont think that i can get 2 extra hd's to set up a RAID.

do u need 2 drives to set up a RAID or will one drive do? the all the reading that i have done, people have 2 or more drives using RAID. What is the type of hardware that i would need for RAID as my motherboard does not support RAID (no onboard RAID, and i have no clue when i t comes to RAID). i will do some more reading on this...but still need some help . oh almost forgot...how costly is RAID and what RAID set up should i use?

with respect to firewire...anyone know how to get good editing using a firewire drive? is it worth it? what hardware do i need? how expensive is it?

1000101- 2003-06-09 13:54:09 UTC #4

To answer a few questions.

You can indeed buy RAID boards; both SCSI and IDE based.. for robustness make sure the card can do at least RAID 5 in hardware; and attach 3 drives of the same size.
RAID is defined as a redundant array of independant disks. So essentially it could consist of SCSI, IDE, or even firewire drives. It can be quite fast (to the tune of 3-5 times faster than any one single drive regardless of firewire or SCSI) depending on your RAID level; number of disks; speed of those disks; and so forth.
There are different RAID levels which I'll break down in the simplest form for you.

RAID 0 : Stripes 2 drives together to look as one device. Works by interleaving the data between disks for faster writes and faster reads. Its almost 2 times faster than 1 disk on most writes and reads. Has zero redundancy though. If 1 drive fails then all of the data on the RAID 0 is lost. Makes for a good workbench setup. This RAID level runs just as fast on hardware controllers as it does on software. It requires at least 2 disks of identical size.

RAID 1: Mirroring. Takes 1 drive and copies it to another; then when you go to write; it writes to both disks at the same time. If one drive fails you can just replace it and your RAID controller will duplicate the data and get you back up and running. Or you can run on just one drive.
This is supported in software by win2k and theres no overhead except when duplicating an existing drive. This RAID level requires 2 drives and can often be combined with RAID 0.
i.e. one RAID 0 stripe mirrors to another RAID 0 stripe for max performance.
Obviously the disks ahve to be of identical size.

RAID 5 (I skipped 2,3,and 4 for simplicities sake) Similiar to RAID 0 in that it interleves data between disks; however it also creates a parity block in the process. What this allows it to do is have 1 disk failure and be able to rebuild everything on the lost drive.  The writes are somewhat slower than RAID 0; but the reads are equally as fast.  Some software supports RAID 5 though  I HIGHLY recommend using  a hardware controller as generating parity data can be quite cumbersom on the CPU.

This RAID level requires at least 3 disks of identical size. About the contents of 1 drive in the volume will be consumed by parity (though never less than 20% of the volumes size) information. So having 3 40gb drives will yeild you 80gb of storage. And if you get enough disks in the array writes will come close enough to RAID 0.

Firewire is capable of 400mb a second of transfer; However its ussually limited by the device plugged into it. Theoretically you could plug in a bunch of firewire drives and RAID them together and only be capped at 400mb a sec.. Depending on your needs this may be right for you.

Adaptec is a good brand; and i've had positive experiences with LSI logic. SGI makes heavy use of Qlogic cards as well.. as for storage units themselves; Eurologic is a vendor that used to be used by avid; though you can get a half tb of SCSI or fiber channel RAID from storecase for about 10 thousand dollars... it all depends on need I suppose..
Of course if you just want some simple RAID or just SCSI storage you can buy just drives and a controller. A good controller is about $200; the drives can be pricey though. to compare a 144gb SCSI drive is over $1000 new; whereas a 180gb IDE drive is 300 dollars..

This of couse is why Apple can sell 2.5tb for less than 20 thousand dollars. (not much less but the cheapest I can get it[scsi raid] for is more than 10 thousand dollars higher)

Most firewire cards are essentially the same. Wether its suitable for realtime editing is beyond me since I really don't do that sort of thing. As for hard drive; you can ussually buy a firewire enclosure and put any IDE drive in it. (thats all they do)

Its fast as firewire and then some. Most all USB 2.0 chipsets are created equal so not sure if hunting for brand names here is appropriate. Though you might have trouble finding video equipment that supports this newfangled standard..

Hope this is partially useful to you sir.

vyder 2003-06-09 23:05:27 UTC #5

russell, you have provided a FANTASTIC insight into this world of storage... i really appreciate the work that you have put into this post. This has only built up my hunger for more information from the masses!@

ok here goes.

RAID setups:

Hereis where i have a few questions. I am very intrigued by the RAID 5 setup that you have told me about. the only problem that i have is that i do not think that i have the internal space for 3 extra hard drives. is there a possible external RAID 5 system that is readily available on the market? i do not know which websites/vendors to go to, to find out this sort of thing. perhaps if you could point me in the right direction, i could do some more research on my own instead of having to troble u lol .

to be perfectly honest, i do not think that i need a redundancy system at the moment. whenever i am going to get a new memory system, i am also going to get a DVD writer so that i can back up my work. However, right now i am just looking for a system that is fast and affordable, and if possible, external, dont want to have to tinker inside my box anymore . (plus external is so much more convenient now heh.).

since i do not need that much redundancy (my info aint mission critical) would i be correct in saying that i should shoot for a RAID 0 or a RAID 5 card? it seems that the RAID gives partial redundancy which could be useful.

FIRE WIRE AND USB

i was under the impression that FIREWAIRE was much FASTER than USB 2.0. most of the people that i have spoken to all have firewire equipment and not too much USB equipment. I have been researching some fire wire drives and MAXTOR and WESTERN DIGITAL have some good external combo drives (firewire and usb combines) which is very good and flexble. it means that i can transport my work with my to a clients office and show them stuff there (inb movie form, not necessarily real time ).

but for my editing, i would like a speddy affordable (external if possible) setup. right now i have a 60 gb HD that is practically full. my machine is a dual 1.2 athlon so it is fairly ok as speed goes. I get what i can afford u know, so i am looking for a decent system.

By the way is a scsi RAID the same thing as a SCSI ARRAY drive? when i was in scholol they had these really nice scsi array drives (150GB) that would crunch graphics like nobody's business. didnt know what brand they were though...they came in black cases and looked like mini tower.

let me know what u think russell...thanx

bacon 2003-06-10 01:36:54 UTC #6

"freelance animation and motion graphics jobs"

"my info aint mission critical"

If your making money then it is critical. You dont want to loose out on a job/future jobs/reputation when you miss a deadline after your rig craps itself. If you can afford it, be redundant.

bacon

vyder 2003-06-10 04:59:05 UTC #7

sup bacon....

my stuff aint mission critical as said bfore...if i was to spend money LIKE IT WAS mission critical..then i would go for redundancy...but as i said ITS NOT A PRIORITY...my deadlines are very loose....its freelance...if my info dies...i wont lose everything. its not like i am rendering for a movie release man.

i just need some affordable, speedy memory. i backup quite regularly so i wont have to rely on a RAID mirror setup . i dont think that i have the dough to spend on trying to get A LOT of extra HD, AND THEN TO GO MAKE IT REDUNDANT....sorry i aint rich like that yet. MAYBE, if these freelance jobs go well, THEN i can get the more pricey and safe stuff...but for now...i dont need it.

SO, with that said, can u help me out?

soopagenius 2003-06-10 08:16:54 UTC #8

Hey, just also want to add a few things to also think about. Which I found really shocking. I

1000101- 2003-06-10 13:08:31 UTC #9

Allrighty lets see here
where to begin.

Theres lots of RAID 5 setups available on the market; your looking at about 3-5 thousand dollars for an enclosure with one controller in it. It'll likely use either fiber channel or SCSI to get to your host machine.
They have a variety of boxes out there; most every external storage unit out there uses SCSI to talk to the host; most every other one uses fiber channel. However of those units they have some that take SCSI; some that take FC drives; and some that take ATA drives. It can get confusing when you think about it.

Yeah but even with loose deadlines you can still get caught in a trap where a drive fails right as your finishing a final cut. Can be quite annoying.
I do recommend the DVD writer though as a backup.

Remember also that raid 0 offers zero redundancy.. RAID 5 is somewhat protected though not entirely..
See below for more suggestions.

IDE RAID is certainly coming along; it still has some drawbacks that SCSI does not. For one; you can hang 15 drives per channel on a SCSI chain so if you add more 73 gb drives to your RAID 0 stripe you'll outrun the IDE RAID.
IDE is limited to 2 drives per channel; or if you want speed; 1 drive per channel.

Thats not to say you can't buy a 4 or 6 channel RAID controller. In fact; if you want to get away with spending less than the cost of a new honda; you could do quite well with 4 200gb drives and what is commonly refered to as RAID 10.

RAID 10 is simply 2 RAID 0 stripes that are mirrored to each other.
So if one dies you have a copy of it on another set of disks. This is common for alot of db based webservers out there on the net (anandtech.com comes to mind)
To set it up; buy one of those 4 or 6 channel controllers (depending on how much storage you want; I'll use 6 for the example)
Buy 6 200gb drives (probably cost around 2800-3400 dollars);
then setup 2 RAID 0 stripes of 3 disks each (so 200gb each); then do RAID 1 between those 2 either via the controller or via win2k.

This would be the cheapest solution for the most storage.
externals will typically start at 3000 and move upwards from there with whatever storage.
Unless you buy a JBOD (which is just an external enclosure you put disks in) and a SCSI RAID board. JBOD stands for "Just a bunch of disks" and is essentially just a housing for disks. They cost anywhere from 500-3000ish depending on the complexity of the design. The cheaper ones are ussually SCSI with SCSI disks; though you can get them SCSI with fiber channel disks; SCSI with IDE disks; Fiber channel with SCSI; fibre channel with FC; FC with IDE; and so forth.
If you get a JBOD and a SCSI RAID board your looking at probably 5-6 thousandish for 150gb or so SCSI wise

hehhe I could provide more detail but one of my customers has a CPU thats gone batty and I have to go deal with him

vyder 2003-06-10 20:09:55 UTC #10

hey wlx..thanx for that revelation....thats really awesome man.
i have a few questions about that setup.

is that an internal setup?
does my motherboard need to be able to support ATA 133? if not..will it run on a ATA 100?
What types ofhard drives do i need? do i need some of those new SERIAL ATA drives or will any 7200 rpm drive work??

thanks

ALSO: have u used an external fire drive yet? it will probably drop frames i suspect, but i dont need perfect real time capabilities right now. i just need good storage that can playback my media at a decent frame rate (maybe 15fps without using a RAM preview on After Effects).

hey russell, thanks for your response.

you threw me for a curve with that 6 drive setup lol. can u explain it a little better or tell me if i have gotten it right. you are suggesting that i get 6 drives...use 3 for storage, and the other 3 for redundancy?

well i cant afford any of that stuff. 3000-5000 is a little outta my league for the time being. what would be a good setup for about $1000? buy 2 180 gb drives and setup a RAID mirror?

u say that the RAID 5 does partial redundancy..can you specify what gets backed up?? if that is the case then i might put down a little extra for the RAID 5, but u mentioned that it would be a little bit slower on the writes (or was it reads? lol).

1000101- 2003-06-10 20:26:05 UTC #11

Hrmm; if I had 1000 dollars for my storage needs and I wanted some level of redundancy; I'd pick up this RAID board

http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetai...ductCode=132606

Its 266 dollars

Plus either 3 or 4 of these drives

http://www.googlegear.com/jsp/ProductDetai...e=101213-315002

They're 200gb western digital 8mb cache drives. 200 dollars apiece. Not too shabby. I might even pick up a couple.

When you set it up; you can use RAID 5 with 4 drives and get 600gb of space; or RAID 10 with 4 drives and get 400gb of space; or RAID 0 and have no redundancy for 400gb of space with 4 drives.

Heres a better description of RAID 10.
you have 4 drives (200gb apiece)
You take the first 2 and make that (we're calling each pair a volume for simplicities sake) Volume0
then you take the 2nd 2 and call that Volume1
then you tell it to make Volume1 an exact mirror of Volume0

RAID 5's protection works off of parity
if I have 3 200gb disks and I write data on it; 2 of the disks get my real data; while the 3rd gets a bit that the controler can use to recreate the data in the event one of the other disks is gone.
You can lose any 1 drive without data loss. You'll have to replace it of course to get that protection back. If a 2nd drive fails your SOL.

Speed wise; on a RAID 0 stripe that I get 75mb a second writes to; I might only get 65ish out of RAID 5 in a similiar setup. Read speeds are close to identical and more often than not are limited by the PCI slot your cards plugged into.

soopagenius 2003-06-10 22:32:17 UTC #12

You will need an ata133 card (do not use the standard 100 on your motherboard use that for your dvd cdrw etc..)
The drives are internal. Here is an example (ebay link) of what you should get. You would need to get 2 of these and hook each hard drive to a single channel (don't hook 2 on the same channel) the card has 2 channels.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...;category=19570

Note: I do not know this seller on ebay this is just an example of the kit you need. This Kit comes with the PCI ATA133 card.

Also.. I dont use firewire external and never will. I said Fibre "Fiber" which is an external unit. Fibre is faster than everything.

Im going to buy two of these ATA133 kits this week because im so impressed with the results. And will be unhooking my 2 internal scsi's.

If you buy this setup dont forget to stripe the 2 drives together in windows, easy to do.

vyder 2003-06-11 00:59:50 UTC #13

dang....i am seeing how far down the rabbit hole goes .

boy..this is really getting to my head, trying to contain all this knowledge and at the same time trying to research more knowledge AND at the same time, trying to relate my knowledge back to you guys.

ok here goes, this is what i have found out so far.

Level 5 RAID: Striping with distributed parity.
Data and parity is striped across 3 or more drives. Parity is distributed to each drive. Level 5 is the most widely used RAID for servers and other highperformance storage solutions. Any single drive can fail without data loss, ie. at least two drives must fail before any data is lost.

Level 0+1 : Striping and Mirroring.
Level 0+1 combines level 0 and level 1 by mirroring a striped volume. Level 0+1 provides read and write performance very close (or equal) to level 0. Level 0+1 should not be confused with level 1+0. If there is 1 mirror set, a single drive failure will cause the whole array to become, in essence, a level 0 array. Level 0+1 requires an even number of drives and minimum 4.

Level 1+0 : Striping and Mirroring.
Level 1+0 (sometimes referred to as level 10) combines level 0 and level 1 by striping a mirrored volume. Level 1+0 has better data security than level 0+1. The reason for this is that the level 1+0 controller can take advantage of a partial mirror set, but the level 0+1 controller cannot take advantage of a partial stripe set.

i got this from tomshardware.com forums...a nice place to hangout ask for opinions.

ok, Russell,

i took a look at that set up u showed me and boy is it sweet, however 1) i dont think i need so much space (as in 4 200gb drives LOL) 2) my tower can only accomodate 3 Hard Drives.

The ATA adapter card that i saw was a bit too expensive for me at the moment. i mean it looks good but i think the most memory i would need at this stage would be 200gb. That card u showed me supports up to 8 drives (4 ports). i only need 2 - 3 drives if necessary (explained further below). I saw some nice ADAPTEC cards for like 70-100 bucks, looks like that is what i might need. it has 2 ports (is that the same as channels?) and can support RAID 0,1,0/1.

So i think that i am taking your advice (and bacon's) to get it mirrored. so it looks like i will be getting 2x200gb drives. now this is where it gets kinda tricky.

WLXI recommended that i get teh MAXTOR ATA133 drives as they are a bit faster than the regular ATA100 drives taht you were suggesting. However, i do not see any ATA133 RAID cards out there (i havent found any...if they are please help me out).

If i was to go with this system, would i have to make WIN2K pro do the raid setup for me as opposed to the RAID card doing the work, sparing some of the processor work? One system seems faster (the ATA133 setup) however, is it really that much faster if the processors onboard need to do most of the work for the RAID internal setup?? ( i remember russell, that you recommend that I use hardware RAID as opposed to software RAID, but in this case would it work??).

My next question is, if it was to only get 2 drives, i suspect the best RAID setup is the RAID 1 setup, where i could mirror my drive. however, this isnt as fast as the RAID 0 is terms of read and write. can i set up a RAID 1+0 (or RAID 10) with only 2 drives? they say that the RAID 1+0 is almost as fast as the RAID 0, but has the advantage of the redundancy.

it gets worse......

currently i have a 60 gb HD in my tower. When implementing this new memory system, should i remove it completely? would it make sense to get a third 200 GB drive (to replace the 60 gb) and set up a RAID 5 or RAID 1+0? also, this 60gb drive is FAT32! the reason that i did it this way was so that i could also play a lot of my games (huge gaming fan). some games wont work too well on the NTFS system, but work great using FAT32 on WIN2k pro!

WHAT PARTITION TYPE SHOULD THIS NEW MEMORY SETUP BE? i have a feeling that it should be NTFS only because i read somewhere that win2k pro can only handle FAT32 partitions up to 30-36gb or something like that if WIN2k pro is used to format the disk. (i hear that if i used win98 to partition a drive, then it could be any capacity i wanted).

should i completely remove the 60gb and boot from the RAID? what are the implications of booting from a RAID setup?

WLXI - i saw those kits and they look awesome man, but why wold u need to buy 2 of those kits? couldnt u just buy 1 kit and 1 200 gb drive? woldnt that work? your comments are also appreciated.

1000101- 2003-06-11 01:25:44 UTC #14

This card isn't truly "hardware RAID"; it just contains a BIOS to allow you to boot a RAID 0 device. Truth be told if you allready have a system drive you can save yourself alot of cash by getting an extra ATA controller. They're only 30 bucks.. some even come with drives.

They may not exist as noone really supports ATA133 except for Maxtor. most have stopped at ATA 100 and for good reasons.

A. ATA is almost completely played out
B. Serial ATA is coming in to replace it and its a much better protocol

Since you'll be doing RAID 0; theres no reason to spend the extra cash for a "Hardware RAID" controller. Any ATA 100 or ATA133 controller will do just nicely. Software RAID 0 is just as fast as Hardware RAID 0; except in that with a REAL hardware RAID board you might get 32 or 64mb of cache

This is quite true; 1+0 is essentially as fast as a RAID 0 stripe. Theres next to no overhead with this setup but it requires a minimum of 4 drives to work. RAID 0 will give you the highest performance period
RAID 1 will give you redudancy. Depending on your budget (I'd recommend a new case; maybe one of the antec cases; 3 bays is just not enough these days)

I myself would keep the 60gb drive as a system drive and leave your media disks independant from your applications and system disk. I do it this way for max performance. You'll also want to use NTFS on your media disks as well.
the reasons for this have many folds. NTFS is journaled; NTFS is faster; NTFS supports massive file sizes; NTFS supports large volume sizes; NTFS natively supports long file names.. the list goes on.
NTFS is just all around a much better file system for windows.. As soon as you can get away from fat32 I recommend you do hehehe.
i.e. as soon as all your games run fine on win2k and XP.

First you'd need a RAID board that supports this; which costs more than an ATA 133 controller by about 20-40 dollars depending on brand/features.
I myself wouldn't worry about booting off of a RAID 0 stripe; prefering my system to either be standalone or budget withstanding RAID 1.
I also prefer to keep my system drive seperate from my work drive. While windows is busy with your swap file for example; that drive won't have as much bandwidth available to it to throw video at me. So I keep the video on a seperate drive all together.

Ussually they just throw the card in the kit anyway. Its allways handy to have extra parts in case of a failure anyway. They rarely charge more for the kit.

Also; when setting this up; DO NOT set it up as master and slave on one IDE channel. IDE sucks in that performance almost HALVES when you put a slave on a channel. Instead make each drive a master and give it its own channel. This will ensure maximum throughput for you.

To break it down. Keep your 60 gigger as a system drive

and take 2 200gb drives and make them both masters; and put them each on their own channel onna ATA133 or ATA 100 card.

These drives have 8mb of cache so they should be very fast.

You can expect probably 120-140mbytes a second on the reads and probably close to 50-60 on teh writes with bursts up to 80 or 90.

I think for you read performance is more crucial.

vyder 2003-06-11 02:08:22 UTC #15

dang russelll..i was almost in tears reading your posts..u make this thing so EASY to understand....i really appreciate this .

and deeper we go into the rabbit hole.

1.
the reason i asked you about removing the system drive was simply this. if the system drive fails, all the money that i would have spent on redundancy will have come to nought as the system cannot bootup anyways. how to you account for the system drive failing since it is not on the RAID system?

I saw that some HD makers were going to Serial ATA's such as the case with western digital...i dont htink i saw one ATA133 drive on their site. the SATA's look great and with that 5yr warranty..its quite a deal. HOWEVER, the highest they have right now is 36 GB . thats very very small. i suspect that i will get SATA on my next cpu...which will have more space in the case..right now i cant afford to get the new DVD burner, RAID setup, HD's etc and then to get the case and dismantled, reassemble..u get the picture lol.

3.
What is the best low range mass storage RAID configuration u think i should go for (assuming that i drop the 60 gb for redundancy purposes?) RAID 5 with 3 drives? (i guesss it would have to be RAID 5 as it is the best RAID system with 3 drives .) (wow..i answered my onw question lol).

4.
i dug deep and found some ATA133 RAID cards...i guess that i am in business!@ but i dont know which ones to get . hwo can u tell which RAID boards have their own BIOS? most of them are kindy sketchy when it comes to info . i read that some cards (likeadaptec) have the ability to be able to upgrade onboard ram (on the RAID card), is that something worth thinking about if i get a RAID card?

In a 2 drive setup - hardware RAID vs SOFTWARE RAID is negligable? very little differences in terms of performance? which one would be better for me as i can get the 2x200 GB drives with ATA133 cards inclusive
(a note to WLXI, i went on to EBAY and saw those kits for like 189.99, more than 100.00 cheaper than retail price. however most of the places on ebay use PAYPAL. be careful when using paypal, if u use it..only place he amount of money u NEED in the account, nothing more....that should protect you somewhat. check paypalsucks.com for more info.... just trying to look out for my fellow 3d brethren).

hit me back when u have time....oh and by the way...u wouldnt know why i cannot see anyone's avatar's anymore would u? (it is setup so that i can see people images/avatars).

vyder 2003-06-11 02:25:14 UTC #16

slaps self in face

just did some more searches and found that seagate has a whole host of SATA drives ranging from 80-160 GB. however, is seagate a good brand? years ago i had bad experiences with them..how are they now?

oh and...is serial ATA faster that ATA 133 (prolly stupid question) but is serial ATA as fast as SCSI?

i forgot to ask these questions
1. SCSI array is the same thing as a SCSI raid?
2. Arent there any 2 drive external raid system available for low-mid range ppl like me (like the 2-3 drive setup we were talking about)? i mean all the drives i see have humungous memory capacities etc.. i remember at school they use to have 150 gb scsi array drives...dont see much of those anymore. (maybe i just need to know where to look)

1000101- 2003-06-11 03:26:13 UTC #17

Its like delving into the matrix or something haha.

Obviously if the system drive fails you will be down and out of luck. However if your system is on a RAID 0 stripe; its twice as likely to fail. Simply because theres another drive your data is depending on.

WD's SATA line is targetting entry level servers I believe. So capacity is typically low in favor of a faster spindle speed. I believe all of WD's SATA drives spin at 10k RPM; where everyone else is spinning at 7200. It can make a difference in alot of things.. though currently benches show the drives to be on average; the same speed as an ATA100 drive.

You essentially did answer your own question. Note the 3 drives have to be identical or things can get flakey. Of course you'll need one of the hardware RAID boards that supports RAID 5 as well; these start at around 200 last time I checked (which was from a couple retailers earlier today
If you can find one cheaper I recommend it. typically the RAID boards that support cache support RAID 5; but DO DOUBLE CHECK! Don't quote me on that as it would be quite the important feature for you.

This should touch on question 4 as well; If its a RAID card; its supposed to have a BIOS to boot a RAID volume. If it doens't have that BIOS on it; its likely just an ATA controller.

Essentially yeah; since in a 2 drive setup your limited to RAID 0 or RAID 1. If I were truly in need of redundancy in your case; I might get 2 200gb drives and another 60 gigger of the same brand as your current.
Then I'd slap both those ATA 133 cards in my system; install windows if I have not allready; then move my CDROM drive to one of the cards (and a burner or other to the other channel) then put the other 60 gigger on my secondary IDE channel; and RAID 1 my 2 60's together for a mirror.

Then take my 2 200gb drives and put them on the other ATA controller and stripe em in RAID 0.

Then if my system drive dies I still gotta bcakup; and my workbench isn't redundant; but if It functions as a workbench only thats not a horrible deal.

DVD burners come in handy here.

Seagates IDE drives i haven't liked; though I'm quite fonde of their fiber channel and SCSI line. Perhaps that quality is trickled into the SATA line. SATA is a simpler design; it would be hard to screw that one up heheh.

SATA is theoretically faster than ATA 133; and in fact has a much higher ammount of headroom than ATA 133 will. (ATA 133 is the peak of the 80 pin IDE rig)

a SCSI array could be a SCSI JBOD; a SCSI RAID enclosure; or even just a bunch of SCSI disks. its one of those generic catchall terms. It could even be an enclosure that takes SCSI disks but is in fact using fiber channel to plug your host into.

Theres probably someone out there with a 200 dollar enclosure that holds 3-5 drives; I can only imagine finding that sorta thing on ebay. Most of my customers require anywhere from 500gb to 5tb of storage; so I don't deal with the little stuff that much anymore.

vyder 2003-06-11 14:05:13 UTC #18

omg...wow..as usual, thanx russell.

just outta curiousity, what line of work do you do? 500gb - 5TB worth of space!@ let me know.

ok, that last setup that u mentioned sounded pretty good. 2x 200GB and 2X60 GB. however, that setup requires 4 drives of space . i only have 3 LOL. which is why i was asking you is it good to prolly go with 3x200 gb and have a RAID 5 setup. i only have 2 empty bays left for hardware in my tower. (my next one will have plenty more, space for at least 4 drives).

WHATEVER system i get though, i want REDUNDANCY, you and bacon have convinced me, however in your previous post u said u would go RAID 0 for the 2x200 GB. i think the whole system should be RAID 1 or some other RAID that offers redundancy. It wont be as fast as RAID 0 from what you told me, but it seems that it will be speedy enough for me to run VIDEO applications and crunch grahpics .

My current mother board has ATA100 ports built onto it. can u setup a RAID system straight from the motherboard like that (no add on cards necessary)? the reason i am asking this is because my motherboard doesnt have onbaord raid (like the next step up in the family of the same motherboard). If i can setup a RAID system straight from the ATA100 ports, then why would i need to have an onbaord RAID system? just curious.

currently this is all i have to work with. right now i have a floppy drive, and internal zip drive (i guess i could get an external zip and that would free up an extra space, but once again this would require more money.) i will double check.

i wanted to ask you another question russell. are there any "front loading kits" for these hard drives? what i am basically wondering is there some kind of rack that i can install on my system that when a drive dies i dont have to go inside my box. i can just slide it out etc..

last night was a good night. i found out that maxtor has some decent SERIAL ATA drives for about 200-250 (7200 RPM 8 MB cache). They have a serial ATA 160 GB for a little over 200 bucks (they also have 80,120 and 200 GB sizes). plus adaptec has a serial ATA RAID card out now, so that option looks promising. the only problem is that the drives might take me a long time to get as they are in high demand.

do i need an special software to be able to run a serial ATA drive, and not to mention a serial ATA RAID? is the adapter card the only thing i need? will win2k recognize serial ATA drives, do need special motherboard etc.?

how much better/faster is serial ATA compared to ATA 133?? is it that much big of a difference that i should go with this system? if this is the wave of the future, then i might as well go with it.

can anyone vouch for the quality of seagate drives nowadays?

1000101- 2003-06-11 15:23:20 UTC #19

I'm a systems integrator. We sell mid range hardware to various folks out there that have the need hehe. They're all about future expandability as well.

3 drive RAID 5 setup with 3 200gb drives sounds good. You will of course require one of those 200 dollar RAID controllers as well.
This should be plenty fast for many of your editing needs; and will provide you with 400gb of space to work with.

The short answer here is no. To make things complicated though; it is possible. You can do RAID 1 with the onboard motherboard IDE ports; but thats as far as you can go if you want to be able to boot off that particular device. RAID 0 will require a special BIOS or you'll need to use something else to boot with. All the RAID controllers out there have this BIOS so you can boot the device without issues.

Some questions for you. How many 5.25 bays dou you have? Are you counting those as available places to mount hard drives? There are drive rails available that will allow you to mount inside 5.25 bays, and most retail box drives come with them.
Moving right along there are removable drive kits that go in your 5.25 bay and allow you to avoid opening the case. And if your controller supports it; then you might even be able to hot swap drives when there is a failure. (Only if your controller supports it; most IDE controllers save for expensive RAID ones do NOT support it)

You'll just need a controller card and some drivers to make use of serial ATA. Its not much fater than ATA 133 currently; and it supports hot swap; and it requires less power. Its definately the next big thing. But that won't make parallel ATA drives useless.
I also do not know if SATA RAID controllers that support RAID 5 exist yet or not.

vyder 2003-06-11 18:46:44 UTC #20

DANG A SYSTEMS INTEGRATOR...then you are the PERFECT person to talk to (that and other 3d people using RAID systems .)

wow...i think i am kinda getting the hang of it. u can do a RAID setup on the ATA100 IDE port of the motherboard ONLY if the Motherboard has an ONBOARD RAID chip. am i correct in saying this? if not, then i should have to get a raid apapter for the hard drives that you suggested that i get 2x60GB drives).

what about that setup that WLXI recommended tho russell (i hope thats your name and not just a saying lol). he suggested that i get two 2x200GB. when i get those drives, i should hook them up to the ATA133 adapter cards. from this point he said to use WIN2k for the RAID setup. can i do this without ONBOARD RAID? if this is the case....can my motherboard do a RAID 1 setup thru win2k even though there is no onboard RAID? getting a little confused with this.

another interesting thing that i saw was that they are now coming out with FIREWIRE 800 drives. i did quite a bit of research on it and it looks really awesome. i knew that you could RAID scsi external drives...but RAID FIREWIRE drives...this totally opened the scope for more research and blew my mind.

apparently the external FIREWIRE 800 drives can just about perform with the same rates as a ATA133 RAID config.

take a look at this russell

http://www.barefeats.com/fire36b.html http://www.barefeats.com/fire36b.html

if you look at the results for the dual FW800 drives...they are almost on par with the dual ATA133 setup lol. only problem is that the FIREWIRE 800 drives currently are kinda pricey...the lacie 200 GB drive is about 349 bucks as compared with the MAXTOR 200 GB ULTRA 133 which you can get for 249-300 dollars. on top of that you need to get a FIREWIRE 800 card which seems to be between 50-80 bucks lol, slightly more expensive, but worth the convenience of having external drives.

if i was to get the FW drives, then i cold RAID 1 them just using win2k pro? i hope that you can help me out.

another interesting thing that i found out was this chart by tomshardware.com. he compared the speed of one of seagates new 120GB SERIAL ATA HD's. the funny thing is that the SATA drives right now arent as fast as the ATA133 drives....i thought they were much faster@! (i know that they are to get faster pretty soon lol, but for now..doesnt seem like it).

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030204/index.html http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20030204/index.html

although this was done in feb., have the drives gotten that much faster than the ATA133?

right now it seems that the ATA133 drives options seem to be the best fit in terms of speed and cost (not convenience lol). the ATA133 by all means seem to be much faster that the SATA drives right now.

another thing that i found interesting was that lacie has an external scsi drive that seems to have a decent price on it. I wanted to ask u thin question:

if the external scsi unit has 2 HD's, can i RAID those drives within the EXTERNAL drive or do i have to buy a second EXTERNAL scsi drive and RAID them? (do the external units count as one drive?). smae question applies to the FIREWIRE drives.

hope that you can help me out .

thanx

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