Team...

I am thinking of doing a Raid array for hi speed storage.

I am thinking of 6 x 500Gb drives, utilising 2 lots of 3 drives in Raid 0+1 ie striping and then mirrored.

Apart from some expensive solutions, anyone got any really good suggestions?

This will be for some hi throughput audio recording (possibly some video as well).

All thoughts gratefully recieved.

Don't know so much about the H/W side of it, but this is excellent S/W to run

http://freenas.org/doku.php

That is of course if you're working with a fast network. If it is locally attached storage, someone else can answer

Don't forget backup as well. RAID just lets you accidentally delete your data twice.

if your going to run a raid array on a pc just use it for the booting and apps hard drive not the storage.

i have 2 raptors which are 67 GB each this turns my pc into a super booting machine.

If you use stripping on big hard drives its alot of space used up and very little difference unless your continually moving stuff from drive to drive.

I have a

2.8 quad core Intel proc
4 GB Dual channel 8500 ram
asus motherboard
2 x 680 GHZ graphics cards on SLI.

i run 2 monitors + one projector when im dj'in and unless im copying stuff from a memory card to the main drive its never slowed down at all.

i have had files downloading. unzipping 5-10 different files, running web apps in background, copying to my NAS box and its still useable.

Hope this info is useful

"RAID just lets you accidentally delete your data twice."

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Originally posted by v8kid
"RAID just lets you accidentally delete your data twice."

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With that number of drives I'd be going Raid 5. You loose one disk's worth of storage not 3.

quote:

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Originally posted by auroan
With that number of drives I'd be going Raid 5. You loose one disk's worth of storage not 3.

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Hardware raid is good but it is tied to the exact hardware type --- if the controller goes down you could be in soapy bubble.

What bitrate must you sustain?

quote:

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Originally posted by britishtrident
Hardware raid is good but it is tied to the exact hardware type --- if the controller goes down you could be in soapy bubble.

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Had a chat with a mate of mine who knows this stuff - he has suggested taking a look at this link to work out what speed you want v's which hardware. Like most things I guess you get what you pay for..



http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_nas/Itemid,190

Guys this is a bit more than a home NAS. It may have several audio streams to record all at once, and probably one or two Video streams.
Basically this it to monitor two TV channels, and several Audio channels as well.

All down to me doing daft things as a Radio Ham!

All the info is useful, as I dont have a lot of experience with Storage arrays.

That website is really useful, as it give me comparisons of kit etc.

Any more info would be greatly appreciated.

For what you're doing (basically write throughput based) ; Unless your using a good top range hardware raid card going 0+1 will actually see a performance degregation. What 99% of the cheaper / std controllers / software based solutions do when writing is write to one disk first, then the second, then do a parity check between the disks to make sure the mirror'd data is correct.

So basically unless you have a system that does duel concurrent writes to both mirrors (v expensive) and single a parity check raid 0+1 is not the way to go.

[Edited on 7/3/11 by auroan]

To paly around with RAID download FreeNAS and try it on any PC box

I'd be using a bigger pair of drives in RAID 1 and using an SSD for caching if I were you.

Then again, for audio, even uncompressed 24bit audio isn't exactly a problem for a modern hard drive. How many channels are you expecting??

Chris