Maybe a stuid question about RAID?!?!?

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the froot

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if my motherboard claims to not support RAID, is there anyway i can set this up to support it? with a RAID contoller maybe?

ASUS P5GD2-X motherboard

its odd because in some specs of the board it says it does, in some it doesnt.
PLEEEEEASE HELP!!!!!

(excuse my computer stupidity, i still prefer 1" tape!)
 
You can add a SATA2 RAID controller card pretty inexpensively. Try newegg.com
 
I recently priced these at a local store...El cheapo SATA RAID was 29.99 and el cheapo ATA RAID controller was 39.99.... WTF? Must be less complicated or something?!?! :p
 
a) for recording, raids are an unneccesary complication (I personally witnessed a networkadmin cry when a terrabyte raid died. Twice.) A dedicated 7200rpm harddrive can stream upwards of a hundred tracks.

b) You won't gain that much in performance. Sound-on-Sound magazine did some tests last year and came back with 10-15%. Not worth it.

c) You REALLY wanna rely on a $30 controller for all your valuable tracks??? Go for it, kid...

:-))
 
TimOBrien said:
a) for recording, raids are an unneccesary complication (I personally witnessed a networkadmin cry when a terrabyte raid died. Twice.) A dedicated 7200rpm harddrive can stream upwards of a hundred tracks.

b) You won't gain that much in performance. Sound-on-Sound magazine did some tests last year and came back with 10-15%. Not worth it.

c) You REALLY wanna rely on a $30 controller for all your valuable tracks??? Go for it, kid...

:-))
Click to expand...

Well......I don't use RAID anymore.....
 
A lot of the cheaper raid cards are pure software raid, which windows XP lets you do anyway!

Brian Tannkersley who always builds AWESOME systems for nuendo is running raid on Highpoint 1820a cards, not cheap, but not anywhere near the price of the pure hardware raid cards. His results are in the 170's! But like stated above, a single decent hard drive should have more than enough oompf
 
Raid is excellent for recording. If you are using it for back up purposes that is.
 
Raid is good for data security... I forget what they all are, but at a minimum you need two drives.. It'll store indentical info on both drives.. So if you've got two 100gig drives you get 100gig of total storage A more effective method is using three or more drives with the data replicated by an algorithm across all of the drives.. Three 100gig drives will net you 150gig of storage.. Four 100gig drives will give you 200gig and so on and so forth... I've seen drives fail a lot more often than I've seen the entire raid array controller fail.. And even if the raid array controller fails, the data is still on the drives and can be recovered once a new controller is installed...

Raid controllers have little to nothing to do with increased performance, they are for data security...

--
Rob
 
First of all my primary job is in IT, I am a network administrator. The only reason I am saying that is because alot of people have opinions about stuff and don't really have any first hand experience with it. Second of all, there are different levels of RAID, and each has certain advantages and disadvantages.

RAID 0 is the raid level that gives the best performance boost. Basically it increases your HD bandwidth by writing to several drives at one time. It is basically like running your HD's in parallel.
RAID 1 mirrors your data on multiple drives. Whatever is written to one drive is written to all drives. This gives you an increased read rate (because you can read from each drive simultaneously)
 
Woohoo for IT jobs!... I work in a supercomputer center (no, really... I do..)

Of course, I'm only a lowly computer operator... :(
 
RAID 1 is NOT a backup solution, unlike most people will tell you. If you get infected with a virus or your system crashes, every hard drive has the same exact data, so they are ALL crashed/infected. All RAID 1 protects against is hard drive failure. If a hard drive fails, you still have one with all your data on it. You should be backing it all up anyway, because it is much more likely that your filesystem will get corrupted, you will get a virus or your windows installation will get corrupted. The other thing about RAID one, is that it basically wastes half your hard drive space (if you have 2 disks) - because it just mirrors one drive on another. RAID 1 does not give you a performance increase when writing to disk. If you have 2, 200 MB disks you will only have 200 MB storage capacity.

The only other RAID that really applies to home recording would be RAID 5. Raid 5 requires a minimum of 3 disks. RAID 5 stripes across multiple disks like RAID 0, but it stores parity information on each disk also, which will allow you to rebuild the disk set if one dies. However it takes time to rebuild the set, and it uses extra disk space with parity information. If you have 3 200MB disks you will probably ony have 400 MB capacity.
 
A 0+1 array has sub segments in a RAID 0 configuration mirrored in a RAID 1 array. To the best of my knowledge, it does not use parity striping.....
 
I have never had a virus corrupt my audio data drive. I have however had a few drives crash. A mirrored raid array is well worth the cost for data integrity. Its like insurance. It sucks having to give up the monthly money, but often times it only takes having to use it once for it to pay off 10 fold. No back up solution is completely free from the risk of viruses. Thats up to the user to solve that problem. No hard drive is immune to the possibility of failure. Mirrored raid arrays are an excellent way of protecting your important data. They should not be your only source of back-up, but they are a great start. Hard drives are cheap now, and most motherboards support on board raid now adays. It seems silly to not use it.
 
Crash © said:
Raid controllers have little to nothing to do with increased performance, they are for data security...

Rob
Click to expand...
They are talking about the bleeding edge performance available in the RAID configuration where the data is striped across several drives so that all the writes take place simultaneously, artificially inflating the bandwidth some.
 
drstawl said:
They are talking about the bleeding edge performance available in the RAID configuration where the data is striped across several drives so that all the writes take place simultaneously, artificially inflating the bandwidth some.
Click to expand...
That's not really bleeding edge. This type of RAID technology goes back to the 80's, so it is a proven, safe, technology. Probably every company with more than 50 employees uses RAID on their servers for either failsafe Data protection (mirrored drives) or Disk Performance (striping) or some variation of the 2. It's important to note, that RAID alone is not an adequate backup plan - you need to have some sort of backup scheme either using a tape Drive, DVD's, or portable hard disks.
 
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