RAID Striping

[YorkshireTrippe]

Hi, I'm getting a new hard drive for my new pc. 1TB methinks. But for a little extra I could buy two 500GB drives and link them into a RAID 0 array. I've heard this can speed up access times? Obviously when recording you're hammering the disks so is this a good idea? Does anyone on here use a RAID 0 array?

If its not a massive improvement I'll buyer a cheaper 1TB drive and defrag it regularly so any advice would be appreciated cheers

 

[altitude909]

cheapo raid is crap, dont even bother and get one good drive. With a stripe, if ANYTHING goes wrong with either driver you loose EVERYTHING. Plus, cheap raid controllers will actually use CPU and memory resources of the host machine actually reducing performance of the computer while improving the disk access.

 

[TimOBrien]

Sound-on-Sound magazine did a big test a few years back and their upshot was that RAID wasn't worth it. Desktop raids are inefficient at recording only provide a slight speed bump, while making your computer setup more complex and giving more things to fail. Standard 7200rpm drives can stream over 100 track simultaneously anyway and you just don't NEED to do raid.

Separate dedicated drives help a lot to let you stream more tracks with less problems. The goal is SMOOTH UNINTERRUPTED THROUGHPUT of data so you wont get clicks, pops or worse, dropouts. Your sample libraries and audio projects should be on separate drives so they can stream without interruption.

Here's how you want your system set up:

C: (Boot) OS, apps and vsts - your applications and vsts are generally only loaded once and don't hit the disk thereafter HOWEVER your OS will need to do occasional housekeeping work and you don't want this activity to step on the recording/playback stream.
(order of secondary drives doesn't matter)
Most systems reserve the D: drive for DVD/CDs.
E: Sample libraries
F: thru Z: Music projects and misc data

 

[Yonce N Mild]

If you do raid you gotta do it on the motherboard. Windows raid is crap. Most newer motherboards have decent SATA raid controllers. I agree that it's not worth it if you are looking for a speed improvement. I mirror (Raid 1) my data drives for redundancy/backup purposes.

 

[Bristol Posse]

If you're serious about RAID of any kind your going to need to get a separate hardware controller. Onboard RAID is very poor at best and uses system resources, so you pay for faster read/write speeds with CPU load.
A really good RAID card here in the US (Something like an adaptec 5405) is going to run you over $300 bucks.
While stability is very solid and performance is plain fantastic with these cards (night and day vs onboard RAID) HDDs are as prone to failure as always and since in RAID 0 the data for a single file can be spread over however many drives you have in the array, if one drive fails you loose everything.
As already mentioned a single good 7200 RPM Drive can stream enough data for approx 100 tracks inbound. If you are using the same drive for OS, Apps and recording, that will be less since it's not a dedicated recording drive.
If you have gotten a gig to record the London Philharmonic plus choir with everyone in the setup needing their own mic then it may be worth considering a RAID array. If you are recording less than 50 inputs it's not even a consideration in my book

You'd be better served by having a separate system and recording drive so you have all the OS and apps running on the C drive and recording to the D drive.

As far as RAID backup, Meh. The problem is since it is straight duplication any data corruption, viruses, malware etc is duplicated so it is not the most secure way to do it, although it is instantaneous and you don't need to remember to do it.
Personally I'd rather go with a solid daily file/data backup to offsite (something like jungledisk.com) and a montly disk image to a separate HDD

 

[Yonce N Mild]

As far as RAID backup, Meh. The problem is since it is straight duplication any data corruption, viruses, malware etc is duplicated so it is not the most secure way to do it, although it is instantaneous and you don't need to remember to do it.
Personally I'd rather go with a solid daily file/data backup to offsite (something like jungledisk.com) and a montly disk image to a separate HDD

That's why I only mirror my data drive which only holds data. My system drive gets backed up with Acronis true image to an extrenal drive.

As far as viruses and the like. My DAW PC doesn't even sniff the internet. I don't even run virus protection on it.

 

[Bristol Posse]

That's why I only mirror my data drive which only holds data. My system drive gets backed up with Acronis true image to an extrenal drive.

As far as viruses and the like. My DAW PC doesn't even sniff the internet. I don't even run virus protection on it.

Yep that'll work
I'm just paranoid about having all of my data in the same place (I've personally seen that onboard/local backup doesn't help you in the event of fire/flood/earthquake/burglary where you physically loose everything) which is why I backup offsite and can recover my data from anywhere on any machine at a cost that is lower than buying external drives every 18 months or so

 

[TheGuitarMan]

As far as RAID backup, Meh. The problem is since it is straight duplication any data corruption, viruses, malware etc is duplicated so it is not the most secure way to do it, although it is instantaneous and you don't need to remember to do it.
Personally I'd rather go with a solid daily file/data backup to offsite (something like jungledisk.com) and a montly disk image to a separate HDD

The whole point of a Raid 1 array in the first place is to be able to rebuild a volume if one of the hard drives fails completely. It was never intended to be a "backup" in the traditional sense.

Also, not all hard drives are designed for Raid implementation. $50 1TB drives aren't suited for it.

Offsite backup isn't a bad idea, in case of catastrophic failure/flood/fire or what have you. But have you ever tried to download several hundred gigs of data before? I can assure you that it would take a long damn time to do so and it's only complete up to the date of your last disk image, obviously. You should always have some sort of physical, local backup for your data, if it's that critical, to reduce downtime. Offsite backup is for the worst case scenario and not very convenient as your only backup option.

 

[Bristol Posse]

Offsite backup isn't a bad idea, in case of catastrophic failure/flood/fire or what have you. But have you ever tried to download several hundred gigs of data before?

No I haven't nor do I ever forsee the need to. I keep disk images locally for recovery purposes and keep data backed up offline. My average album project normally runs under 10GB. Once I'm done with it I take it off my active drive and move to backup so the most data I would ever need to recover is 8-10 GB in a single shot if I were to have a recording drive crash at the point an album is almost done, which on a 20 meg connection isn't that bad to download.

Now granted if I were looking to recover every project I've ever done that would take a long time but all of the finished music is on CD too. I just keep the projects backed up in case I ever get an urge to remix and I think off site on Amazons Cloud servers is more secure than in my house with my kids little fingers getting at them etc.