raid arrays
I've got a custom DAW which uses a Supermicro P4SCT+II that has onboard Raid. The system integrater suggested a mobo with separate buses for GS3( PCI-X ), Scope Professional ( PCI ), Matrox G450 ( AGP ). The benchmarking still continues as we speak.I have the option of RAID 1, 0, 10, and 5, with an Adaptec ZCR card , which sits in a selected PCI-X slot. For live performing this example is 100% stable so far.GS3 Orchestra is giving me 300+ voices, and 4 instances of Gigapulse. Scope card has no PCI overflow messages,runs stable at 80% DSP usage. Raid 1 only seems to use 1% of CPU! These are results that live performers should know about. No longer do I bear crossed fingers at DAW's. Especially Scope 4.0,GS3, 875P combos. This particular DAW configuration has convinced me to leave my hardware for software ( well, almost ).
From what I understand, in the studio enviroment, or with a sequencer, Raid 0 is good for more polyphony. Since this is a live rig, it's designed for hot swapping, and redundancy. I wouldn't need the extra polyphony that it generates. Plus the Marvell SATA controller has excellant mirroring algorhithoms.