Serial HDDRAID, 875 chipset and my DAW

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rcktdg

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I am building a new DAW for my studio. I am using a MSI 875p NEO mobo. Part of the 875 chipset is RAID support on the northbridge meaning that the raid pathway does not use the PCI bus.

My question: will RAID (striped) be an advantage regarding digital audio?

I am planning to use the RAID as my project drive and I will store things I'm not working on on single HDD backup.

I am aware of all the risks associated with data integrity and striped raid arrays but I am not sure about the performance gains.

Currently I my rig is:

MSI mobo
P4 3.0c
1 gig ram
80 gig WD ide (OS)
120 gig Seagate serial HDD audio
MOTU 2496 mk3/424 audio card.
Sonar 2.2

I am thinking about dual WD 10k rpm for the RAID or just a second seagate. This MOBO has HDD options galore.

Any thoughts?

Thanks, RD
 
rcktdg said:
My question: will RAID (striped) be an advantage regarding digital audio?
Click to expand...
Striped drives result in a higher transferrate, the seek times remain the same. What does this mean for DAWs? Not much. A single harddrive is already capable of continuous transferrates of over 50MBytes/s which is sufficient for a shitload of tracks (dozens), even at 24/96.

IMHO RAID is cool, nice to brag about, but for the average, and even not so average home/project studio, it isn't necessary.
 
I'm kind of thinking serial ATA already has 150mb transfer rate so maybe it's enough.

Currently I'm regularly working with 14 tracks and see exceeding 16 sooner than later. All of it is 24 bit. I guess I'll have to work with it awhile and see what it's like.

Is there any advantage to on OS on a raid? It doesn't make much sense to me. It seems only data that needs security or speed would have much use for it.

From what I understand a striped array writes faster, reads the same and a mirror writes the same and reads faster. Is that true?

All pretty weird stuff to me.

Cheers, RD
 
rcktdg said:
I'm kind of thinking serial ATA already has 150mb transfer rate so maybe it's enough.

Currently I'm regularly working with 14 tracks and see exceeding 16 sooner than later. All of it is 24 bit. I guess I'll have to work with it awhile and see what it's like.

Is there any advantage to on OS on a raid? It doesn't make much sense to me. It seems only data that needs security or speed would have much use for it.

From what I understand a striped array writes faster, reads the same and a mirror writes the same and reads faster. Is that true?

All pretty weird stuff to me.

Cheers, RD
Click to expand...

I don't see RAID being that big of an advantage for audio, unless maybe you use RAID1, which is mirroring. RAID 0 isn't even redundant, so what's the point?

In a money-making situation where everything nuance counts, like a pro studio, I could see it. But Home recording, with regular backups? Not really necessary.

I think 2 Raptors for OS and audio, plus a 120gig EIDE for longterm storage, would be sweet.
 
rcktdg said:
Currently I'm regularly working with 14 tracks and see exceeding 16 sooner than later. All of it is 24 bit. I guess I'll have to work with it awhile and see what it's like.
Click to expand...

24bits = 3 bytes. at 96khz -> 288kBytes/s
16 tracks = 16 times 288k = 4.6MBytes/s


4.6Mbytes/s. Now compare that with a single drive that does 50MBytes/sec sustained. :)
 
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