joseph.barron
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Striping SATA Drives
I'm re-building my disk structure on my system and have a simple question, well maybe not so simple. I have 2 x 32GB 10K RPM SATA drives and a 250GB IDE (boot drive). Typically, I use the 250GB for boot and for project Archive. I use the 32GB SATA drives to store active projects and my BFD drum samples. Does it make sense to stripe the two drives, without parity, or leave them seperate. With SCSI I've seem huge improvements in performance. Does striping in SATA give the same benefit.
The downside I'm concerned about is that my Motherboard Fails and the stripping controller on it is lost. If I have two seperate drives, then no worries, any SATA controller with read them. But if they are stripped, all bets may be off.
Thoughts?
Regards,
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Muziekschuur
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 02, 05 7:19 PM
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If you use auto backup you may be fine. (there are utilities like Backer who can do). If you haven't such advanced archive method
I would advice against the use of raid 0. You don't need it. A throughput of 60mb can take care of a audioproject of more than 100 audiotracks. You do not need that kind of performance....
Regards,
Muziekschuur
I use Bagend speakers. You should hear em too.
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jyoung
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 03, 05 1:16 AM
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Striping without parity will give you the same kind of performance gain that you would with SCSI. That is what i do with the disks that host my project files and I've benchmarked a significate gain in performance over using single drives. Just make sure that you backup your projects regularly, since you increase the points of failure for every drive you add to the array.
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eric_peterson
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 03, 05 11:12 AM
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Asus A8V
AMD 64 4200 X2
3 LCD monitors
Mucho storage
FW-1884 jyoung, I see you also hail from the "Jungles of Oregon" :-) Are you happy with the Asus A8V and AMD 64 4200 X2 combination? Is it stable? What kind of latencies can you achieve in SONAR? Are you using the onboard firewire ports of the A8V Deluxe? I'm thinking that if the IEEE port is usable I'd like to use that for my DV camera. I'm still on the fence as far as my upgrade goes. The only thing I have decided on so far is the Matrox P750 which I got for $135 on eBay. So, I'm locked in to a AGP8X board at this point. What card are you using to drive your 3 LCD's? I also have a 3 LCD mixing console. -Eric
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darc
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 03, 05 12:07 AM
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Related question I've been asking here and there - still essentially unanswered - having built a system w/ 2 SATA drives in a RAID 0 Array, is there still any benefit (i.e. physical difference) to mulitple partitions (ie. a separate partition for audio files) or is this now just a logical distinction to windows. I guess multiple partitions will make for smaller cluster sizes, but otherwise I'm thinking it's irrelevant now.
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joseph.barron
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 04, 05 7:54 PM
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I'm not really looking for Redundancy as much as performance. I have a bunch of external Firewire drives that I use for backup and burn regularly to DVD.
At this point I'm not pushing that many tracks. But I'm in the middle of a project where I could have dozens of tracks.
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joseph.barron
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 04, 05 7:56 PM
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Very good point on the point of failure.. I backup fairly regularly during music development,, but as I get into final recording mode, I backup constantly.
Regards,
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Stratman
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 04, 05 8:25 PM
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Don't bother striping if you are using an onboard controller . You need a controller card to get a good usable stripe . Onboard is good for anything except audio . And do use a good backup utility so if you do lose the stripe all is lost .
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songsmyth
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 04, 05 9:17 PM
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ORIGINAL: darc
Related question I've been asking here and there - still essentially unanswered - having built a system w/ 2 SATA drives in a RAID 0 Array, is there still any benefit (i.e. physical difference) to mulitple partitions (ie. a separate partition for audio files) or is this now just a logical distinction to windows. I guess multiple partitions will make for smaller cluster sizes, but otherwise I'm thinking it's irrelevant now.
There is no benefit to having a seperate partition for audio files (except as you noted, maybe some extra storage) but the performance is the same as one disk, because it IS just one disk. To get a performance benefit you really do need a seperate drive for system/application and audio. Hope this answers your question.
Cheers! David P4, 2.26ghz, 2gb ram, 180+360gb 7200hdd, dual monitor system- fx5700Ultra, Audigy Platinum, inspire 5700 SRS system, Tascam 424MKIII&Porta05HS into SONAR 5PE / Adobe Audition / Project 5 V2 ...
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jyoung
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 04, 05 10:37 PM
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I see you also hail from the "Jungles of Oregon" :-)
Are you happy with the Asus A8V and AMD 64 4200 X2 combination? Is it stable? What kind of latencies can you achieve in SONAR? Are you using the onboard firewire ports of the A8V Deluxe? I'm thinking that if the IEEE port is usable I'd like to use that for my DV camera.
I'm still on the fence as far as my upgrade goes. The only thing I have decided on so far is the Matrox P750 which I got for $135 on eBay. So, I'm locked in to a AGP8X board at this point. What card are you using to drive your 3 LCD's? I also have a 3 LCD mixing console. Yes, my setup is working very well, is stable, and very snappy. With my FW-1884 I can take it down to 5.3ms running 128KB buffers. I'm actually using a separate firewire card in PCI slot 4 and turned off the on board firewire. My video is an Asus GeForce AGP for monitors 1 & 2 and a cheapee GeForce 5xxx for the third monitor. Thats a good price for the P750. I thinking of going with a P650 with the 3rd monitor kit, which has no cooling fans.
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joseph.barron
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 04, 05 11:05 PM
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What is the difference between the onboard and seperate controller? Don't you really need to know the motherboard I'm using before you can really make that judgement?
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jyoung
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 04, 05 11:42 PM
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Don't bother striping if you are using an onboard controller . You need a controller card to get a good usable stripe . Why is that? My MB has the same chip set as a controller card and my stripe array is certainly usable.
post edited by jyoung - November 04, 05 11:43 PM
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joseph.barron
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 05, 05 0:16 PM
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I noticed you have three LCDs. I have a dual head AGP card. Did you just add anther PCI card or are you using the onboard video? Lastly, I have two 17" LCDs running at 1280x1024 and aa single 15" running at something less. When I tried to use the 15 & 17, before buying the second 17, I was forced to the lower resolution of the 15. Are all your monitors the same size and resolution?
Thx
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jyoung
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 05, 05 0:44 PM
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ORIGINAL: joseph.barron
I noticed you have three LCDs. I have a dual head AGP card. Did you just add anther PCI card or are you using the onboard video? Lastly, I have two 17" LCDs running at 1280x1024 and aa single 15" running at something less. When I tried to use the 15 & 17, before buying the second 17, I was forced to the lower resolution of the 15. Are all your monitors the same size and resolution?
I added another PCI video card. I'm running three 19'' monitors all at 1280x1024. Depending of the card, you use you may be forced to use the lower resolution on a card that has two outputs. In a multi-monitor setup it is best to have all your monitors the same size and resolution. This make for a nice consistent display.
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steverispin
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 05, 05 8:55 AM
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joseph.barron: What is the difference between the onboard and seperate controller?
The difference is in where the controller sits with respect to the processor. Some of the more modern chipsets include sata raid controllers built directly into the chipset, with a direct line to the processor. This is good, as the controller can talk directly to the CPU. Others put the controller on the PCI bus, so the controller has to go through a potential bottleneck to get to the CPU, sharing bandwidth with all the other traffic, eg streaming audio. If the controller is on the PCI bus, there is no real difference between the onboard and separate controllers, but the PCI-card controllers offer more features, like support for Raid-5 and cache memory, which gives more data security and speed, respectively. This is also a good thing, but you have to watch your PCI bandwidth. This applies to most SCSI solutions too Once the chipset manufacturers start including non-lobotomised controllers (ie With Raid 5,10, +separate upgradeable cache, +not on the PCI bus) in their chipsets, everyone will be much happier. Personally I get round this by having a dual-CPU machine (not X2), with a dual PCI-bus. One bus has Audio on PCI, the other Storage on 64-bit PCI-X. Don't you really need to know the motherboard I'm using before you can really make that judgement?
Yes. I'm not really looking for Redundancy as much as performance. Raid 5 gets you both, even better with a hot spare. HTH Steve
Ain't no plant can outwit me! -Steve (despite all evidence to the contrary - Mrs Steve)
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eric_peterson
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 05, 05 10:04 AM
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Yes, my setup is working very well, is stable, and very snappy. With my FW-1884 I can take it down to 5.3ms running 128KB buffers. WOW! That must be awesome. My old 1.3 GHz DAW requires about 200 msec latency these days to be drop-out free. I'm actually using a separate firewire card in PCI slot 4 and turned off the on board firewire. So, the onboard FW was problematic? Thats a good price for the P750. I thinking of going with a P650 with the 3rd monitor kit, which has no cooling fans. I thought about that, but the fan noise won't be a problem for me since I built a small machine room into my studio. Where in Oregon are you? I'm about 9 miles south of the OR/WA border in the Tigard/Bull Mountain area.
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jyoung
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 05, 05 11:36 AM
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So, the onboard FW was problematic?
quote:
Thats a good price for the P750. I thinking of going with a P650 with the 3rd monitor kit, which has no cooling fans.
I thought about that, but the fan noise won't be a problem for me since I built a small machine room into my studio.
Where in Oregon are you? I'm about 9 miles south of the OR/WA border in the Tigard/Bull Mountain area. Well, I already had a good FW card and just wanted to avoid any potential problems that could possibly occur with the on-board controller. The on-board controller could possible work just fine, but the arrangedment I chose work fine in a nother machine, so I stuck with it. I'm down in the opposite end of the state, by the CA border.
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davidchristopher
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 05, 05 3:20 PM
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ORIGINAL: jyoung
Don't bother striping if you are using an onboard controller . You need a controller card to get a good usable stripe .
Why is that? My MB has the same chip set as a controller card and my stripe array is certainly usable.
Likewise. My audio drives are RAID0 SATA, and there's definately better performance here. 20-40% at least 
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Stratman
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 27, 05 11:32 PM
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Why is that? My MB has the same chip set as a controller card and my stripe array is certainly usable. It may have the same chipset but not all the other peripherals on it . It is a slimmed down version . Very basic controller . If you get a full card it will handle the data much better . The biggest thing I noticed was when I used loops or blocks of data . It had a hard time splitting up the data and I got pops and clicks . It worked great when just recording audio . I have a built on promise raid . I guess I shouldn't have said it can't work . I meant if you want the best performance get a full controller card . You don't have a full card on your MoBo .
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jcschild
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RE: Striping SATA Drives
November 28, 05 9:38 AM
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HI Joseph,
1) no point to raid unless your doing 96K or using the raid for huge sample libaraies.
2) a single (new) Sata drive (or even IDE) will do up to 150 tracks 48k (depending on effects etc)
3) the onboard controller is more than sufficent. for audio drives you need to use the native chipset. 3rd party chipset often cause pops clicks.
3rd party are generally ok for samples.
4) in many tests the onboard raid was faster than an add in card, didnt take a PCI slot. in fact an add in raid card is a joke in most situations
and not required for the average user. if your doing HD video editing or live multi cam streaming for broadcast then and only then does it make since to use a add in controller
like a highpoint 1820 (uses CPU) or a 3ware card (no cpu usage). and only due to the fact few motherboards support 8 sata in raid. (or SCSI)
for Pro Audio unless your working in 192 a raid card like this would be a complete waste of money.
Scott
ADK
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