Gigabyte ud7 best raid

[merryn]

Hello, I have just got a Gigabyte UD7 board and a 128gb SataIII SSD drive which I figured would make most sense to use as the OS and Apps drive in one of the 6gb sata ports.
Is this a good idea or should I leave the two SataIII connectors to set up a raid on two Western Digital WD6402AAEX 640GB Hard Drive SATAIII 7200rpm 64MB Cache - OEM Caviar Black drives (or similar).

I am looking to be using Adobe Premiere with some HD footage which needs quite a bit of fast storage and I have seen that keeping to 640gb drives with two 320gb platters will yield the best access speed and throughput results

Bit new to raid but not afraid

OS will be Win 7 Pro 64
I7 930 CPU (clock to around 4ghz)
6gb DDR3 ram (for now 12gb soon)

Any suggestions please?

Thanks

 

[evongugg]

We just do not see SATA 6Gb/s technology offering any real benefits for spindle-based hard drives on the desktop at this time. Rotational speeds are being kept in check at 7,200rpm with all the performance improvements coming from increased areal densities and cache. We expect SATA 6Gb/s to really come into its own with solid state drives.

 

[merryn]

thanks I figured the ssd may as well use one of the 6gbs slots and leave the other spare for now,
I have been reading that the Sammy F1's are about the best bang for buck in terms of speed and size, but I want fast, reliable, quiet and ideally some redundancy, is there a better choice? have kinda gone off seagate recently, and the velociraptors, well they went out with the dinosaurs, too loud, too hot, not actually seeming that fast in desktop usage

Do you think I should just work on standard flat drive config and do regular backup to nas or similar, rather than raid?

I figure my workflow will be as follows:
dump footage from compact flash to hdd,
transcode it where neccessary, colour it
edit it, effects, titles and soundtrack
and then render for bluray / dvd / web as appropriate

again many thanks for any tips anyone want's to give

 

[evongugg]

RAID1 will lower the speed of the drives, as it has to write one additional time.
If you are looking for performance, the NAS backup is a better choice.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Check out the performance charts and pick whatever 500 GB per platter drive performs best under your usage patterns. The 2 TB WD Black and XT from Seagate are good choice but at smaller capacities, you are limited to the Seagate 7200.12 or the Spinpoint F3. The 7200.12 excels in gaming, multimedia and pictures whereas the F3 wins at music and movie maker. See the comparisons here (copy past link in manually, link won't work in forum):

(http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-charts/compare,1006.html?prod[2371]=on∏[2770]=on)
And yes, an NAS is the way to go for external storage.

 

[merryn]

what a nightmare, (sorry this will be a long post)
I set up a raid 0 using the UD7 Intel Raid bios utility with two 640gb wd sata3 drives, using the 6gbs ssd for my os an apps as planned, all seemed to be sweet and I was pleased with performance.

Just as I finished sorting out the transferred files on the desktop and started my backup to the Terrastation NAS things started going a little freaky.
I had added some extra ram that day to bring it up to 12gb which didn't seem to be a problem until I started copying files to nas for backup, during quite intensive load on the drives I had a couple of bsod so I removed the new ram and on reboot the bios complained of not being able to boot properly due to overclock settings (not my doing) so to be safe I loaded the fail safe defaults to boot while I figured out what was wrong.
At this point one of my raid drives was no longer a member although it showed up fine, and appears to be fine but was obviously causing the raid to fail. Damn no files, no raid and no backup!

After a week of late nights adjusting bios settings, reading forums and trying raid repair and recovery software I was getting nowhere, in the end I was resigned to my loss and had read that someone suggested deleting the raid and recreating it again with the exact same settings, ensuring I didn't format it at all.

I did this, booted to win7 pro 64 (as usual) and through disk management I could see the raid volume although no drive letter and no partition structure. I created a primary partition on the drive but then it wanted me to format the drive, damn.
At this point I thought I would try running a straight ntfs recovery software (Raise) for a laugh more than anything else, within a couple of clicks and a minute it had found all of my files and I am now copying them onto a separate drive... result.

My question is (finally) I am back to square one, once I finish copying my files I will want to either format the raid and get it back online and carry on like before, or I choose to run the two drives normally (separately with no raid) or maybe get a third drive and set up raid 5 as I am a little put off by raid 0 or possibly raid altogether as my mobo "software" raid controller as it could be flaky.

I also then want to put my ram back in and up the clock a little but I need to have a stable system
I don't know what to do first I guess I should test the drives and memory thoroughly in case there is an intermittent fault, then should I look at PSU or temperature related issues (I don't think it is this), or should I just stick to basic settings, I don't need blistering, but obviously having spent the money on the components I would like to have a system that can run fast and reliably

Any ideas please?

 

[john mk]

Hello, I have just got a Gigabyte UD7 board and a 128gb SataIII SSD drive which I figured would make most sense to use as the OS and Apps drive in one of the 6gb sata ports.
Is this a good idea or should I leave the two SataIII connectors to set up a raid on two Western Digital WD6402AAEX 640GB Hard Drive SATAIII 7200rpm 64MB Cache - OEM Caviar Black drives (or similar).

I am looking to be using Adobe Premiere with some HD footage which needs quite a bit of fast storage and I have seen that keeping to 640gb drives with two 320gb platters will yield the best access speed and throughput results

Bit new to raid but not afraid

OS will be Win 7 Pro 64
I7 930 CPU (clock to around 4ghz)
6gb DDR3 ram (for now 12gb soon)

Any suggestions please?

Thanks

For good video editing you need 3 seperate logical drives which have reasonable speed. Your main source footage drive must be very fast and large as it has to stream much data to premiere for it to build your project. Your secondary drive should have good write speed as this is where you put your rendered files. Your system partition should have good speed to cope with virtual memory and adobe cache and program files needing to have fast random access. A good setup would be 4 drives as raid5 for source footage, 3 drives as raid0 for encoded files and your main system partition being SSD

IMHO