4 identical HDD; 1 or 2 RAIDs?

[jrachvr]

Hello,

I have 4 hard drives to configure in my new build: Caviar Black, 320 GB, 64 MB cache, SATA 6Gb/s each.

My motherboard has 2 SATA I/Os for 6Gb/s and 6 SATA I/Os for 3Gb/s.

This is for a video editing rig (Adobe CS4). Should I stripe two drives SATA 6Gb/s and two drives SATA 3Gb/s and have the OS on the faster or slower channel?

Or should (can) I use one drive for the OS and stripe the remaining three (RAID 0)? If so, which drives on which SATA I/Os?

Thanks in advance!

-JR

 

[gtvr]

Couple of possibilities.

1) Make the OS/apps sit on a RAID 1. Work area for video editing on the other 2 drives on a RAID 0. Normally I'd say OS faster, but a few seconds extra to boot is outweighed by the speed you want for video editing & working with large files.

Do a temporary backup of "permanent" video files or important stuff to your RAID 1 drive, use the RAID 0 just for working files. Do a long term backup to external drives.

2) Make a RAID 10. Gives you good performance all around, and good redundancy. Still back up important files to an external drive. This gives you somewhat less total storage, but better redundancy and very good performance.

 

[sub mesa]

You seem to think SATA 6Gbps is faster somehow. It is not. Your HDD cannot even saturate SATA 1.5Gbps; let alone SATA 3.0Gbps or 6.0Gbps. You could connect it to SATA 800000 - and still get only 100MB/s in the most ideal case.

So use SATA 3Gbps for any HDD; the 6Gbps ports are for future SSDs; like the ones coming christmas this year.

With Adobe you have the opportunity to set a separate disk as scratch disk. This disk should not be your OS drive. Also, if you truely care about performance you have to shop for an SSD instead.

 

[jrachvr]

Thanks guys. I guess I'm another one who 'learned the hard way' about how meaningless sata 6 is. At least the price for these drives were very similar to their sata 3 counterparts. This is my first build in 6 years, so i'm bound to hit these snags in technology i've not used before.

I'll be using the RAID 1 for the OS and permanent video files and templates and RAID 0 for working files. I'll be getting a couple of TB sized externals for sure.

Thanks again.

 

[jrachvr]

Best answer selected by jrachvr.

 

[cadder]

My first impression was RAID 10 (1+0), as long as 640GB total is enough space for you.

 

[jrachvr]

My first impression was RAID 10 (1+0), as long as 640GB total is enough space for you.

Thanks cadder. but sub mesa said it best with the idea of having a scratch disc. gtvr's solution makes the best use of working drives that i can wipe clean after each project while still keeping my permanent videos/templates on the same drive as my OS. in the end, i'll still only have 640GB of working space, which i hope will be fine for 1 or 2 projects at a time.