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Need help with mass storage and realtime editing

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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

1000101- 2003-06-11 19:40:36 UTC #21

Typically in this case; the board will actually have 2 extra slots that the BIOS actually pays attention to for the sake of doing RAID.
In your case; if you want to do 2 60gb drivse mirrored; you can do that on the regular IDE controller in software. You'll only require a controller if you want to do RAID 0 with them.

Absolutely; in fact you can do this whole thing with just standard ATA controllers. (My name is Russell by the by
Plug your 2 200gb drives into an add-in board; and plug a 60gb drive into your secondary IDE controller; then take the extra add in board (assuming you buy the 2 kits) and put your CDROM drives there. Then boot win2k; tell it you want to make your 2 60gb drives a mirror and your 2 200gb drives either a mirror or a RAID 0 stripe. (you can append as well; its marginally safer but its slower)
It can get quite confusing, especially when shopping around for this sort of thing. So We'll start from scratch with a checklist.

We've decided we want 2 60gb drives mirrored (RAID 1) for our system. We don't need a RAID board for that because win2k can boot a software mirror just fine. You can even break the mirror and use the 60gb drive later for something else if you want.
We've also decided we want 2 200gb drives to store data on. Unless we do RAID 5 we can use software RAID here as well. Now it just needs to be decided wether you want more capacity and speed; or data redundancy. You seem to have an idea of your needs so I'll let you judge that.
We also want to avoid any slave drives; so since the 200gb drives appear to come with ATA controllers; we'll go ahead and use both of them so every drive gets its own channel without hurting performance.

This is indeed very interesting. Thanks for the link! Essentially they had a chance to do an experiment I allways wondered about. Theoretically its allways been possible to do such things but I've never had the means to test it.
That is a really cool card though. Wonder if I can convince the office we need to do similiar tests haha.

The speeds are definately acceptable though. If you can find all the materials for it; it'd be worth trying at least.

Yeah; SATA isn't faster just yet (despite its being rated at ATA150); however the protocol itself has several advantages over the traditional ATA standard. Hence its coming forth. Some SATA drives can do some things MUCH faster than a comparable SCSI drive; other things they come in slower than ATA drives. Its all about tradeoffs.

Easy enough. Lets assume you have a SCSI card with 2 external channels; and you have 2 enclosures with 2 drives in them each.
When you first power the machine on and boot up; the OS will see 4 SCSI drives. If you choose to RAID them together; then the OS will see them as 1 big drive. Very simple!
the same applies to firewire. Your OS will see each seperate drive until you tell it to RAID em together somehow.

Now the exception to this rule is hardware RAID controllers. The RAID controllers themselves will see the seperate drives but won't make them available to the OS until after you've configured the controller. In this case if we were to make 2 RAID 0 stripes that we intend to mirror in win2k via software; then the OS would then see 2 very large disks out there and let us do whatever to them.

tito212 2003-06-12 00:38:06 UTC #22

i ended up buying a PROMISE SX4000($165).
This is a 4-channel IDE RAID card. Giving you the ability to to RAID level 0, 1, 5, 0+1.
This card also requires a 64-256 Meg RAM chip to be installed on the IDE RAID card. Giving you a serious boost in I/O.
I bought 4- 120 GIG Western Digital drives($110).
All i can say is 266 Megs/sec sustained read..
so for editting, this should totally suffice..
BUT....
if you wanted to go a step further....
you can get the SX6000 that has 6 - dedicated channels of IDE with a RAM cache option on that as well....

p.s. - check out newegg.com
go to the controller, add-on sections.

Just make sure you get a case that has enough room and cooling fans in it.

hope this helps.

hell-raiser 2003-06-12 14:08:41 UTC #23

WLXI-TV

What type of fibre storage are you guys using? The reason I ask is because we're currently looking to buy a system here, but we cant find ANYTHING that comes even close to your numbers. (ATA wise that is).

One of the units we are looking at is 12 drives nearing a terabyte of storage. Its sustained readwrite is around 180mb/s.

Are these INTERNAL numbers? What are you using to test the thruput?

Actually from reading this entire post.. It seems like everyones numbers are a very high from the research Ive been doing. Maybe Im not reading the numbers right though...

Any thoughts?

dave

1000101- 2003-06-12 15:20:51 UTC #24

What unit you looking at Dave?

I know the marketting reports on the units we sell say 200mbytes per second;
but in my tests I've found I can only come close to 180ish on reads.
maybe 60-80mb a sec on writes.

It all depends on how you write to the disk; wether its just 1 large file; a bunch of small files; and how much data you send to the storage at any given point in time.

hell-raiser 2003-06-12 15:47:29 UTC #25

Hey Russell..

We are looking at a couple actually.. The Medea FCRX2 and a unit from Raid King.. (Dont know the number off hand.. )

Have any suggestions..? we would like to be able to network this among multiple workstations.. (Oh and Raid 5 of course)

Thanks!

dave

vyder 2003-06-12 17:22:28 UTC #26

hey guys...really appreciative of the responses here!@

ok russell, its starting to clear up a bit, just a few more questions to go LOL

why does anyone need onboard raid if you can RAID thru win2k on the regular IDE ports? (i didnt understand your explanation that well).
Why is it so easy to setup a RAID with adapter cards but not so easy with the IDE ports?
Why buy raid cards if you can RAID with WIN2k? (i am assuming because the cards have higher levels of RAID, but i am not sure .

russell, how would this system work:
lets say that i buy the 2 200gb kits from maxtor, and i get 2 adapter cards each with 2 channels.

a. i put the 200 GB drives on on card (separate channels)
b. i put the 60 gb drives on the other card (separate channels)

and then hook up the cd-rom and the dvd burner to the regular IDE ports ?. or should it be the other way around? (switching the 60 gigs with the optical drives).

seeing as how i am a novice at RAID, what system would be a good start for me to learn from? we mentioned going for a RAID 5, but is a RAID 5 more complicated in setting than say a RAID 1? if so, i think i am better off starting with something small, learning it, and then advancing to another level on my next machine. I am definately going for a redundant system now . so maybe i should buy 2 new 60gb drives as well lol.

so far this is what the setup looks like.
2x 200gb maxtor drives (are the western digital 200gb drives faster?)
2 (or 1) 60 gb drives (when setting up the RAID will i have to reformat my existing 60 gb HD?)
possible RAID card - russell what do you think about that promise RAID card tito spoke about..seems interesting, might give a performace boost and it isnt too expensive.
DVD -burner
external FIREWIRE 800 drive (for my other computer, using it for storage of stock footage files etc..)
FIREWIRE 800 combo card (usb 2.0)

look like it might cost about $1200 in all but it will be worth it.

tito, that sounds like an awesome setup. unfortunately i only have 2 empty 5 1/4 inch bays and no 3.5 inch bays . i have an internal zip drive that i might be able to remove and switch it for an external zip u know, saving space internally.

tito, u mentioned a very interesting point, right now there are only 3 fans in my case....LOL, 2 for the processors, one for the CASE it self. any setup that i am going for, is cooling PARAMOUNT or near the top in terms of priority? if so, what are my cooling options? i saw the other day some hard drive coolers which look nice, but those would only fit in my 5 1/4 bays and not the 3.5 bays as they are tightly spaced.

another thing i have to check is power supply. what if i do not have enough spare connectors for these new harddrives? do i need to get a new power supply or can i buy "splitters" or extra power plugs? right now i have a 400 w power supply and a 400 watt UPS that protects me for 1/2 hour when power fails...

appreciate the help guys.

PS OMG THANK YOU DAVE!@ THATS THE NAME OF THE EXTERNAL SCSI ARRAY THAT THEY HAD AT MY SCHOOL...what an epiphany LOL...MEDEA@!

1000101- 2003-06-13 02:48:29 UTC #27

Medea is that other RAID company.
I hear decent things about them. Are you going into a fiber channel switch as well?
and are you looking at a clustered file system? or just going to use a series of network mounts?

1000101- 2003-06-13 03:05:53 UTC #28

Lets say for the sake of argument that you want to make your system drive RAID 0. i.e. you really like fast bootups hehe. Your systems main BIOS won't understand what the RAID 0 stripe is so it won't be able to read the boot information off of your disk.

This is where the onboard RAID controller comes in. Its BIOS sets up the RAID 0 and very well understands precisely how to boot from it. It can also be used to make the RAID transparent to the OS for whatever reasons.

For me its just as easy; but a dedicated hardware RAID controller has more options and of course makes you not have to fiddle around with tools in the OS. If you have a hardware RAID controller and you setup a RAID 5 set of drives; and you want to format them
you don't have to reset it all up in the OS when your done. Your controller just shows the OS 1 big disk as opposed to 3 or 4 smaller ones.

follow?

If you want to boot RAID 0; or if you don't feel like dealing with RAID in the OS (some people are that way)
or of course
if you want a better more robust RAID level like 5..
or if you want faster performance; as most good hardware RAID controllers (150+ price range) will have at least 32mb of cache on them; and can be upgraded to as much as 1gb.

This is very similiar to my system mentioned above. You'll of course need the driver floppy to install windows (which comes iwht the card)
you'll have to hit F6 when doing the install and put the disk in. Other than that; it should work flawlessly.
The only difference is that your optical drives stay on the motherboard IDE which is fine.
your motherboard IDE is no faster than IDE on a PCI card.

Well good RAID is transparent to the user ;> RAID 5 only seems more complex to setup because you have to remember that you need at least 3 disks and your not getting the full capacity of every drive in the stripe.
As far as flagging options in a controller card its just as easy with any RAID level.
You just have to know what you want to do.
plan ahead.

Okay where to begin. You can avoid a reformat but only if you keep your 60 giggers on the motherboard IDE. Otherwise things might get complicated and your better off starting from scratch. If you want to avoid formatting though; move your optical drives to the controller card and put your other 60 gigger on the secondary as a master.
Then open disk admin and setup your mirror.

I believe the promise RAID board he was refering to just as a boot BIOS on it; I'd look it up though. If it supports RAID 5 its likely to have cache and be faster; and worth the extra money.

The rest sounds pretty cool; stuff I might look into buying one day soon. After my next big video card purchase and all.
hahaha
damn me and my toys.

I'd check the inside of your case; see if its warm. If it is might be worth putting an exhaust fan on the rear.
Never can be too cold.

As for your power supply; 400 watts should be good. I have a 450 I believe which is more than sufficient for a 2.8ghz p4; and 4 hard drives as well as 1 optical drive.
I gots plenty of juice left.

This cracks me up because I've been trying to remember this storage vendors name FOREVER.

soopagenius 2003-06-13 06:50:50 UTC #29

Daveenedy, I'm using a Sun A5200 Disk Array 800GB with 2 interface boards and a Atto Fibre bridge. this has 22 x 36.4GB drives. This is my personal array for my home studio. I paid about 15,000 US for it a year ago but you can get it for (A LOT) less on ebay, lol.

Atto has a benchmark utility that ships with their products however there is another utility and you can download it here
http://www.steelbytes.com/download/hd\_speed.exe

You may want to try buying 2 Fortra/JMR SCSI boxes (each box holding 10 drives) and run each box into the NEW UL4D Atto card (dual RAID card) which is really nice. Im using the UL3d card with 2 fortra boxes and can do HD and even view large sequences with out a problem. Just as good as my fibre array. The UL4D is the new dual raid card version www.attotech.com

....................

thanks Russell w/ the paypal heads up.

hell-raiser 2003-06-13 13:35:33 UTC #30

Well our intentions were to get a gigabit switch.. but Im not sure that would give us enough bandwith... a fibre switch would be an option but arent fibre cards kinda pricy?

Im not really sure what you mean by "clustered file system"... sorry

Im a 3D guy with some hardware knowledge just trying to figure out the best way to get a system that will match our needs...

Maybe someone has a suggestion or 2..? what we are trying to do is network 5 or so workstations to be able to run (edit) real time D1 video over the network...

(I realize this is a costly endeavor.. and not many people are doing it but its been kinda tough trying to find anyone that can even talk to me about this with video in mind.....)

thanks

dave

1000101- 2003-06-13 16:25:40 UTC #31

Sounds like you might need something like ADIC's StoreNext file system. (I know I'ma reseller for it but I'm not just pluggin the brand and all)
It'll allow fast local access for all the clients connected to a SAN.
Qlogic sells reasonably priced fiber channel cards (qla2200 should still be on the market) for about 799ish now I believe. Thats for the 1gb cards. They have 2gb cards that sell for about 1200 last I checked; which was about 6 months ago. A customer ordered 14 of em for his setup. Good stuff.
The biggest hit would be from the fiber channel switch you may need if you have more than 4 clients connecting. Those start at around 10 big ones for 8 ports. But it'll give you really fast speeds.

http://www.adic.com/ibeCCtpItmDspRte.jsp?m...p;section=10121
for more info
if it sounds like what you want it might be worth looking into.

not sure how much bandwidth you'll need; but I'd hate for you to drop a bunch of money into a NAS to do this and not be able to do this.

vyder 2003-06-13 16:31:34 UTC #32

well this is exactly what i am trying to do russell, problem is my limited knowledge of RAID .
thanks for helping me thus far...the more you reply, the more questions that i have...

here are the components that i can possibly use for my setup, if you can, tell me which setup u think i should go with.
2x200 gb Maxtor Ultra ATA133, each on a separate channel of an ATA133 card OR buying a separate RAID controller either the highpoint ROCKETRAID, THE PROMISE RAID controller tito mentioned or and Adaptec RAID card...the most that one for my uses will cost is probably around $160.

i have an extra ata100 adapter card (brand new never been used) that i can use for my optical drives.

SETUP both drive systems in RAID 1 (either by Win2k or by Raid CARD).

i was looking at the RAID card that tito recommended, and it looks like i will have to buy extra memory for that one. but memory is cheap nowadays, so that might be an option

DVD-burner 300-350 bucks
FIREWIRE 800 external 300-400 bucks.
FIREWIRE 800 combo card 50-70 bucks.

that seems to be the setup currently.
a few more reservations tho

how can i tell if inside my case is too hot? whats too hot and how much hotter will it get with this setup in there?
Do i need a BIOS upgrade to implement RAID? how do i know what do i need? do the RAID cards come with BIOS modifications?
if i am setting up a RAID in win2k, does it display all drives first..then u tell it to RAID, then you will c one big drive?
How do i use disk admin? where is it located in win2k pro? would it be better to get a thrid party software to do the RAID setup?

thankx again russell

p.s.
dang, we have some high rollers... here i am scrapping for a 200gb system, and we have ppl in here talking about 22 scsi drives in cases etc... .
what do u guys do? (i already know that russell is a high roller, but what about you other guys posting in this thread).

entityghost 2003-06-14 11:23:50 UTC #33

http://www.secure-server-centre.com/eurote...hp?partno=E1176

vyder 2003-06-14 16:17:42 UTC #34

dont have the loot for that.

vyder 2003-06-15 01:17:15 UTC #35

russell u there?

1000101- 2003-06-15 20:44:14 UTC #36

Yeah
was away for the weekend

I will be posting back here shortly

Just need to get all cought up; maybe a short nap

1000101- 2003-06-16 14:48:17 UTC #37

I'd go entirely with what your budget allows. Speed wise it would be faster with a hardware RAID board; but it can be acceptable without it.

Shouldn't get too much hotter. Worst case scenario you can put a couple exhaust fans on the rear. they're cheap from any online reseller.

You won't need to upgrade the system BIOS; and RAID boards you buy will support RAID without further modifications.

If you look at the disk adminstrator it will allways show every physical device in there thats not on a hardware RAID controller. If you make a RAID 0 stripe you'll have only 1 drive letter for it though.

Start--->control panel--->administrative tools---> computer management---->disk administrator if memory serves.
Shouldn't require any other software for software RAID.
I believe win2k supports RAID 0,1,3, and 5 in software; but RAID 3 and 5 are too computationally expensive to do in software and still have heavy IO.

vyder 2003-06-17 04:42:23 UTC #38

hey russell..hope that you had a good weekend. i been scouring the web for the best configuration to work with.

here is what i think i will finally go with.
i think that i am going to remove my 60 gig altogether and just se 3 200 gb drives in a RAID5 setup. here is why i thinki will do it this way.

from what i have been reading, RAID 5 seems to have better read speeds than RAID 1, which is what i am concerned with: video editing etc..so i will be do much more reading that writing.

with this RAID 5 setup i can get 400gb worth of storage, as opposed to 60 (another 60 gig drive to RAID with my original) + 200 (from the 2x200GB drives in RAID 1).

the RAID 5 gives me redundancy as well as speeds, seems like thebest operation for me. i can be bothered with my games holding me back lol. i figure if i am making this investments, then the games have to take second place to the hardware config. I also have other computers here, which are not as fast of course, that i can use to play the games at the moment. Plus i believe that i can still run the games on this system anyways, but that leads into my first question.

when setting up this RAID 5 system...what file system should i use? NTFS or FAT32?

I saw some sweet RAID cards:
the 3ware Escalade ATA133 Raid card offers RAID 5 and looks hella fast.

the promise sx4000 ATA133 card looks great also, but upon reading the white papers (specs), there seems to be something missing/understood. it says its a ATA133 raid card however it only does ATA133 on reads....and ATA100 on writes LOL. i need clear that up. besides, i am concerned with reads rather than writes anyways .

for RAID 5 they recommend hardware RAID, cuz it can slow down the CPU, which i dont want. so i am definitely going to buy a RAID adapter.

my case has no space for fans at the back, however,i can probably take it to a shop and have them cut the side panelling and install a fan there to cool it down.

just a few more loose ends to tie up and i will be home free LOL

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