4 replies to this topic

[daibido1123]

Hi everyone, I know my question may be odd, but I am getting a X7200. It will be for play and for work, so I have configured it to my needs, except for the Drives. The current parts are 2x GTX 580M, i7 990X, 12GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM, and Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit. This machine will be used for games, Video recording/editing, Photoshop, and audio restoration/editing. So here is the point of the question, what RAID configuration should I use, and what type of disk would suit best for it? The RAID has to offer redundancy, performance, maximum storage size, and can't be larger than 3 drives.


Thanks for the help.

[Challenger]

daibido1123, on 24 September 2011 - 08:40 AM, said:

The RAID has to offer redundancy, performance, maximum storage size, and can't be larger than 3 drives.

Unfortunately on sub $1000 raid controllers its either redundancy OR performance on a three drive setup.

You want performance then you go raid 0 but you'll be living VERY dangerously.

You want redundancy then you go raid 5 but as I said sub $1000 raid cards sacrifice lots of performance when using raid 5.


My advice is you get a SSD for the boot drive so you get the performance for app launches and games and then you use a raid 5 array for all your media files.

[daibido1123]

What about RAID 5 with three SSD's?

[Challenger]

daibido1123, on 24 September 2011 - 10:46 AM, said:

What about RAID 5 with three SSD's?

Ah now that is a different ball game. Few issues with that:

1) No TRIM support when the SSDs are in raid. (having said that my revodrive doesn't seem to have any issues

2) I think you'll still be bottlenecked by your raid controller. Most decent motherboards will come with a raid controller that will be able to do raid 0 fine but raid 5 takes (as i said before) a much better raid controller to get even close to raid 0 speeds with 3 drives.

I still stand by my original comment that you'll be better off getting a single SSD for OS + games and then a single HDD or HDD array for your media. Unless your heavy into rendering in which case you need to look at a ramdisk!

If you want the best performance for your OS + Games then do look at things like the revodrive - but in the testing that Larry, Miha and myself rather unscientifically tested for map loading times there really wasn't a noticeable difference between a vertex2, Revodrive and Revodrive x2 ! For apps it's a totally different story though

If you have really important data then i'd go down the NAS or DAS route and have a raid 5 array in one of those then have an SSD for boot in your computer and a Large HDD as a sort of buffer. So when you export your project - video or audio you can store in on the internal HDD then store a copy on the DAS/NAS for safe keeping. That is basically the setup I have.

[dirtylarryuk]

Challenger, on 24 September 2011 - 11:34 AM, said:

Ah now that is a different ball game. Few issues with that:

1) No TRIM support when the SSDs are in raid. (having said that my revodrive doesn't seem to have any issues

2) I think you'll still be bottlenecked by your raid controller. Most decent motherboards will come with a raid controller that will be able to do raid 0 fine but raid 5 takes (as i said before) a much better raid controller to get even close to raid 0 speeds with 3 drives.

I still stand by my original comment that you'll be better off getting a single SSD for OS + games and then a single HDD or HDD array for your media. Unless your heavy into rendering in which case you need to look at a ramdisk!

If you want the best performance for your OS + Games then do look at things like the revodrive - but in the testing that Larry, Miha and myself rather unscientifically tested for map loading times there really wasn't a noticeable difference between a vertex2, Revodrive and Revodrive x2 ! For apps it's a totally different story though

If you have really important data then i'd go down the NAS or DAS route and have a raid 5 array in one of those then have an SSD for boot in your computer and a Large HDD as a sort of buffer. So when you export your project - video or audio you can store in on the internal HDD then store a copy on the DAS/NAS for safe keeping. That is basically the setup I have.

Depending on your budget a 60-240GB 500 MB RW SSD (Sandforce is still best) for your OS and apps' (this will also have trim) and then a second SSD for games or just video work 60-240GB (for video the PCIE SSDS rock) this saves wear and tear from the OS drive killing the games-video drive then a nice 2x 1TB raid 1 HDD install for backup as raid one keeps going if one disks fails. And a nice 1-2TB USB 2-3 ext HDD for backup of important data daily-weekly. all this doesn't cost the earth you can pick the 120GB PCIE SSD cheap for hosting 5-20 games and or a decent amount of storage for 1080p editing.

SSD works best with a min' 15-25% free space so 60GB drives are only now if your short on budget. but they are still fine to host win7 and have 50% space left and good ones start from £70.

The key is SSD tech seeks files in the microsecond 50-100x faster than any HDD even in Raid can so they suit your OS but you only need 60GB for win7 to have loads of space, also the 40-80k Iops most of the new drives offers is much faster than the 200 iops even the best HDD offer. For video work the 500-1000MB Read the new G2 SSDs and PCIE SSD offer is a big deal for video editing when tied to 8GB+ RAM.

HDD are 33x cheaper per GB than SSD tech so they are still great for storage, if you want to be pro, then use raid 1 on 2x drives with 1TB -2TB,this is fine for 99% of Soho users and then add a external drive to back the raid up on