RAID for DAW

[ARCADIOS]

i have read some aricles about it and raid6 seems the most complete.

at the moment i do not use RAID. but i have been facing the disaster of destroyed drives..... mechanically and not.

any experience with raid6 or raid10 in recording??

[netguyjoel]

RAID5 with a 4th drive for the hot swap is what I use for audio tracks & my sample library.
I also use a separate pair of hard drives in RAID1 for OS & programs.
The speed of RAID 5 on a U320 back plane is MORE than enough output for audio.
16 bit @ 44.1 = 5 MB per mono minute of throughput needed.
and with 320 MB/sec available=64 tracks (in theory)
but I never came close to that...I've experimented with 24 stereo tracks no problem.

[dawman]

Interesting.
Does the Hot Swap replace the failed drive before the rebuild occurs...?

[garyb]

back when recordings were on tape, they got destroyed by accident, occasionally. i transferred recordings of my mother's piano recital at age 13(1957) recently. magnetic storage is QUITE reliable, although the medium is less so(tape starts to physically decompose).

the chances of losing a hard drive's data are MUCH lower than losing the chances of losing songs on tape. for most uses, raid is a waste of energy and computer resources. i can get 35-40 tracks EASILY in ide mode on an old p4 pc. just back the stuff up once in a while, replace your hard drives after a few years, and there's nothing significant to fear.

[netguyjoel]

Interesting.
Does the Hot Swap replace the failed drive before the rebuild occurs...?

No...there will be a rebuild period.
But you can also build a RAID 5 with 4 drives and no hot swap.
I opted for the hot swap...lower risk.
The only problem that could arise, is a second HD drive failure during the rebuild (which is very rare)
Servers with a larger load, will have a slowdown in performance during the process.
SCSI is far more reliable than SATA...but much more $ per GB, so it lowers the risk (somewhat) of a second HD fail.
RAID 1 with 2 fast SATA drives would be fine for most environments....
It just keeps one healthy drive in the mix at all times...

[oxygenial]

No...there will be a rebuild period.
But you can also build a RAID 5 with 4 drives and no hot swap.
I opted for the hot swap...lower risk.
The only problem that could arise, is a second HD drive failure during the rebuild (which is very rare)
Servers with a larger load, will have a slowdown in performance during the process.
SCSI is far more reliable than SATA...but much more $ per GB, so it lowers the risk (somewhat) of a second HD fail.
RAID 1 with 2 fast SATA drives would be fine for most environments....
It just keeps one healthy drive in the mix at all times...

1. There's no lower risk of a failed drive in a RAID5 config with having a hot swap. The only positive is that the controller will/should start to repair automatically!

2. There will be a HUGE performance drop during the rebuild process no matter what the load is!

3. We who have worked with SCSI for 20+ years knows that SCSI is FAR from reliable! In fact, I trust my SATA drives more than I trust any SCSI disk, no matter what any MTBF number will say! Seen so many SCSI disks break, even in climate controlled spaces (racked servers in server halls)!

4. The firmwares on SCSI controllers are far from perfect as well, which has resulted in numerous ejections of perfectly fine disks, specially when rebuilding an array (RAID1, RAID5 and RAID10). HP, DELL and IBM has had many U320 capable controllers, that the firmware limited to 15-16MB/sec per thread!

5. Who's still running SCSI!? SAS replaced SCSI several years ago!

6. Yup, 2 SATA drives in a RAID1 array will get you very far, and 4 SATA drives in a RAID10 will get you even further! If you still want a RAID5 solution, get a really expensive RAID5 capable controller with good drivers! Otherwise you're asking for trouble! Most of today consumer PC's which are built around Intel chipsets with ICH9 or ICH10 controllers works really great when using RAID1 or RAID10!

And since SATA drives are so cheap these days, why not use multiple SATA drives (either via USB or E-SATA) as backups just in case if anything major happens!

IMHO
Mikael

[Strattosphere]

I don't use RAID in my DAW, I just have a large backup partition on my 1Tb primary drive and a batch file on the desktop that runs the XCOPY DOS command to do an update backup from my audio drive to the backup partition with a double-click every time I finish a session. RAID 10 is more elegant but this works for me.

Stratt

[dawman]

Well its an old RAID 3 Netcell card running on a PCI-X slot that has 2 cages for 6 drives, 5 being RAID 3, and it streams large video files. My Brotha' uses that card because of a very low perfromance hit during a rebuild, they call the cards REVO 64's these days, but I can't find any other cards that provide that type of rebuild capability in that price range.
I still wouldn'tuse RAID during a gig though as it just isn't necessary. If I have an OS drive failure I just bluff my way through the tune with an analog synth, then usa a hot spare and reboot.
In 9 years of having DAW's I have never had a crash during a gig because I think I have been lucky, plus I make hot spares after 2 years. So far so good.

[netguyjoel]

SCSI HDs are far more reliable than SATA, AND without the heat issues.
I've been working with servers & HDs for over 15 years, and have had many more SATA drives fail, than SCSI.
I've had more SATA drives fail, than older IDE drives.
But one thing is correct.
A GOOD reliable SCSI RAID array IS expensive.
Between the good controller card, backplane, and drives...it does cost a bit.
SAS is great...but once again...$$$
I'll go back to the affordable RAID solution of just (2) good SATA drives (15K RPM) RAID 1 on the right MB, and will work in over 95% of the rooms & that would be good for live work too...
If you wanted to go a bit beyond that...one RAID 1 for OS & programs and another RAID 1 for audio tracks & sample lib cover both bases...live and or studio work....

[dawman]

Actually on the big shows here they have 2 x 500GB SSD's and the sampled content/OS and apps all reside on a single SSD.
2 x DAW's like this w/ a 32 channel analog switcher is what I have seen. Its 6 months old so the Jury is still out, but I was surpised to see that the overhead from the 3GB's SATA II SSD's was strong enough to compile the applications and OS's.
Even so, down at the Mirage the Love show still uses 2 x DAW's w/ the switcher and Gigastudio 3 Orchestra is what was used to re master the Beatles Masters. They are locked away by Lord something or other in the vaults at the Mirage.
Brotha' Man Gav is a great player and I know he's bored but the checks probably really help out at the end of the week........

ape mlove.jpg

[firubbi]

cool setup

[dawman]

You can see the redundant PC's in each pair of screens.
On the right the custom software for the Quest switchers.
Both play simultaneously and the a simple note on can toggle back & forth.

[valis]

This may have been mentioned already but Raid's use in server computing is for *increased uptime* and isn't a backup solution. So while Raid5 (on up) rebuilds can be slow they keep the machine online, which is important when you have uptime agreements to uphold.

For audio users RAID might be a consideration if *throughput* for track counts (or voice counts) isn't being met, but simply adding the second drive for offloading specific tasks (move your romplers to the first partition on it etc) may achieve the same or better and will keep management of the drives simple. If you're still after backup there are plenty of solutions on optical media, external/removeable drives, possibly cloud computing etc.