Got a raid question

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alidan

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Aug 5, 2009
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last time i looked into this was probably 6 years ago, and the consensus was get a raid controller.

now however im looking into raid for 2 things...

1) a 3 way raid 0 of 3 4tb or 6tb hdds, this is for video capture at 1920x1080 at 60fps and not needing to run it through handbrake every few hours, hopefully enough time to beat most games.

2) raiding the storage drives in raid 1.

now my question comes in a few forms.

can 1 controller handle multiple raids
will raid 1, if taking out of the raid, still function like a normal hard drive
in raid 1, if one drive craps out, what happens? will i need 2 drives to build the raid 1 from the salvaged drive in the original raid 1, or can i plug the new drive into the raid 1 and it figures out crap on its own? is there a risk of the raid deciding the new drive is the one that should be mirrored and losing all data?

these two solutions are not going to be boot solutions for me. so does that make the raid easier to deal with?

also what western digital, seagate, hitachi, samsung drives are raidable? i know there are western digital color drives that cant function in raid but cant remember the colors.
 
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kanewolf

kanewolf

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Can 1 controller handle multiple raids -- Depends on the RAID controller. Something like the LSI MegaRAID card can connect up to 8 internal devices and can handle multiple volumes.

RAID 1 -- Mirrored disks -- data is written simultaneously to two disks simultaneously. A disk pulled from a mirrored pair MIGHT be readable without the RAID controller but don't bet on it.
If a disk fails in a RAID 1 what is supposed to happen (if everything works right) is that the controller shows the volume(s) as "degraded". You then remove the (hopefully easily identifiable) disk and replace it with a new one. The RAID controller then asks if you want to rebuild. Assuming you say yes, then the data is copied from the one disk to the second, while still allowing reduced performance for new requests.
Is there a risk that the RAID 1 might not rebuild correctly -- YES! NEVER treat RAID as backup. You still need a backup strategy if the data is important.

WD has Red for their RAID/NAS disks.
 
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Traciatim

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Why not just use ShadowPlay / GameDVR and then not worry anywhere near as much about space, compression, or drive speed since all the encoding is done on your video card anyway?

Are you going to try to record 1920x1080x60x24bpp completely uncompressed? because that's about 375MB/s you'd have to keep up with, which is attainable but would be pushing it for 3 spinning disks.

RAID1 is generally no faster for writing than having a single drive. You should be able to do something like 3-4 spinning disks for a RAID0 for live recording and high sustained throughput and then 3 drives in a RAID5 or two larger drives in a RAID1 for drive failure safety for your storage once you compress the videos.

If you wanted to do some kind of combo you could do 4 drives in a RAID0+1 which stripes two drives for speed and two for safety so it can sustain one of your drives failing usually. That's probably not going to hit 375MB/s though unless you get way more drives...

That or just try out your video card software for recording and see if it will do what you want anyway.
 
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alidan

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raid 1 is for redundancy, my personal file backup to save me from a disc crash in the computer
the raid 0 would be for capture, and this would entail 34tb or 6tb drives combining to look like a single 12 or 18tb drive

i use dxtory with logarithmic codec, if i remember right, 2 minutes of 1080p on that at 30fps was 3gb, 60fps would be 6gb for 2 minutes, and recording in chunks of 30 minutes to an hour would create a file that is 90-180gb each. and with many games lasting 12-20 hours would be a full 4tb drive in and of itself, than to add to that recording multiple games, and not being required to compress everything, thats what the multi drive is for, well... that and complete control.

i have considered getting a 512gb ssd and using that as the capture drive, with a series of 4tb drives to move the files to, but i would prefer the raid 0 solution if that is possible just because it gives me the overhead for capture speed, and not needing to constantly move files while i'm still needing to capture as a 512gb is a 3 hour session of playing and than needing to dump files.
 
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Traciatim

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I think you should be fine with a 3 drive RAID0 as your write drive even with complete RGB Lossless writing. If you look at something like a WD Red drive I'm pretty sure their rated write speed is something like 140MB/s, which 3 of them puts them close but above even the 375MB/s, and if you are using any type of lossless compression it will probably put that to about half of the required sustained speed, so probably somewhere near 175-200MB/s.

From the examples you gave it seems like it's actually pulling more like 5:1 compression which seems like you only need a shade over 50MB/s which even single drives should handle just fine as long as they are dedicated to the task. In that case you could have one single drive for recording, and then a 3 drive RAID5 for storage (or 4 drive RAID5 or 0+1).

Are you not using RGB24? The 5:1 compression seems pretty good for lossless full 24bit.
 
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alidan

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from my understanding on the codec, it work in the same vein os png, sure you can have a bmp file, but depending on what that file has in it, it is able to losslessly compress it in a png.

the codec i believe is the fastest one (least cpu overhead) whole having the best size ratio.

whats screwing with me right now is i never used a raid card or add in card for sata, so im trying to find a 6 port card, and the only 8 port i found was "non-raid" which came up when i was looking specifically for raid, than that lsi linked above has 2 ports but supports 64 drives... i was trying to find a lower end one because i only need 2 sets, 1 raid 1 and one raid 0 with a total of 5 drives, but i'm not seeing any options for that.

thankfully this isn't something i need right now so i have some time to figure everything out, but not much is jumping out at me as easy accessibility.

i also have a question.
because my brother computer screwed up a while ago, i have no idea how as he is so forthcoming with all the problems of his computer and articulate at telling me "fix it" and my favorite response to what were you doing when it broke "i don't know" his ssd apparently have 3 partitions to it now, and they force drives to different letters and that screwed up all his game drives so he had to re set up steam.

now, if i use a controller and windows decided to do something stupid like put out 2+ new partitions of my boot drive, would the raid 1 and 0 be unaffected? at least from what i know all the raid stuff is handled on card, and it shows it to windows as a single drive, this is one of the main reason i'm hesitant to do a software raid, because if i plug in a thumbdrive and it for some reason it wants to assign it stupidly and move the internal drive order around (this has happened to me before) i'm afraid it would kick the old drives out of raid and either be a nightmare setting it up again, or would cause the raid to fail and data loss.
 
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