[laslane007]

Well, I've decided to take the plunge and get my dual G5 system working like it was always meant to be. I've recently purchased a 74GB Raptor to use as my boot drive for the OS and Apps. I've also just purchased the Swift Data 200 bracket/Sonnet tempo-x 4x4 card for adding 3 more drives internally.

And now I am faced with the decision of what to do with my 4 open slots. I'm looking for something to store all my user data (files, email, preferences, etc.), DVD movies, and various other items. I will also want to have a scratch disk for Photoshop, audio production, and if I ever get into home movies. Anyone have any ideas?

I'm thinking I need to go with a RAID setup, but I'm not too sure on where to go from here. I'm also thinking 250-300GB hard drives since that seems to be the sweetspot price for storage at the moment. Here are a few scenarios I was thinking:

1. RAID 1 two 300GB drives for user data, another 74GB Raptor as a scratch, and a 5th drive used for additional backup of user data on RAID 1.

2. RAID 0 on 2 drives for user data, 74GB Raptor scratch, and 5th drive used for backup of user data on RAID 0

3. RAID 0 scratch on 2 drives for, RAID 1 on 2 drives for user data and backup

4. ????

Any ideas, comments, suggestions for a RAID newbie? My biggest concern is if RAID 1 is a good backup strategy. Is it reliable enough.

Ideally, I would like a good combination of speed with data security, reliability, backup strategy. I've seen to many people get hit by a bad hard drive and losing their data, but I'm tired of burning so many backup discs and would rather keep everything internal as long as possible.

[seanc]

Well i'm confused by the setup you want to create.

I'm not an expert on raid but I think the best option would be to set up a raid with mirroring.

All your drives need to be the same size and the same manufacurer.

E.g. 1x 74gig and 1x 300gig on raid 0 and then the same on raid 1.
In theory the 74gig and 300gig hdd's on raid 0 will be mirrored to raid 1, so you'd have complete duplicates.

Someone correct me if this is wrong, but I think it makes sense.

Sean.

[OreoCookie]

First of all, a RAID is not a backup. I would advise against RAID0 unless the data you put on there is not important.

A dedicated scratch disk (which could also be RAID1) might be worth it, but it entirely depends on what you're doing. A friend of mine is doing Jazz and he doesn't need many instruments. So for the longest time, a 400 MHz TiBook was sufficient.

You seem to have purchased the Raptor already, so I would use it as a primary disk.

Just post some more specifics please.

[CanadaRAM]

Opinion: forget the RAID. RAID 1 gives the security of mirroring but exacts a performance penalty. Under typical Desktop use, the computational overhead of a RAID 0, 3 or 5 negates any speed improvement, unless you have a hardware RAID controller. If you are doing HD video capture, however, you may be the exeption.

Go with:
System and scratch disk space on the Raptor
Applications on the stock drive
Data on another drive
A big mother drive for backup of your data, applications and system. This can be a periodic backup or sync. No real need to make it a mirror.
Potentially a second Data drive just for audio production,

Remember a RAID 1 mirror only protects you against hard drive mechanism failure. If you have data loss from a crash, or from a UBM (User Bonehead Move), then the data is immediately lost from both drives in the RAID set.

And I don't see the attraction of loading up the machine with internal drives, A backup on an external drive is much more fleximle, including moving it to another location to keep working.

[laslane007]

Initially, I was thinking 2 300GB drives in a RAID 1 setup, so they are "mirrored". This is where all my critical data would be stored. So if one goes bad, then the other can be replaced and no data is lost.

Then I would use my Raptor 74GB as a boot drive, and maybe purchase another 74GB as scratch disk. That was my first thought as a setup.

Wasn't for sure if I was on the right track with this or not. Hopefully that helps clarify things.
Basically, I'm going to have 5 drives to work with (1 74GB Raptor, then 4 drives yet to be determined). Just wondering if anyone had any ideas on how best to configure my setup.

[laslane007]

CanadaRAM,
So what your saying is don't rely on the RAID 1 for backup, that I should also have a "big" drive to back everything up (preferably an external due to it's flexability)? And also just to clarify, the overhead of running a RAID 0 or 1 does not justify it's benefits?

[CanadaRAM]

Yes, essentially. Unless you are doing transactional work (like a server does) where losing the last few minutes of changes would be critical, RAID 1 doesn't give you much advantage over a periodic backup system. As I mentioned, RAID 1 protects only against drive hardware failure -- as would a periodic backup, just with a few more hours of changes lost. You can set up software to back up your data on a nightly basis, for example, and this would give you a window of protection against accidental deletion or data file damage that a RAID would not.

You can find much more information on RAID performance at www.storagereview.com - the upshot is unless you are handling particular types of data (HD Video being the most obvious) you don't see speed benefits of RAID unless you are running under multi-user loads of 5 and more people. Its like: pickup truck or dumptruck? Unless you are hauling more than a ton of dirt at a time, you don't see any advantage with the dumptruck, and the pickup is way more efficient around town.

The main thing you can do, once you have the backup thing sorted, (ps. the backup drive can be as big as you like, and doesn't have to be blazing fast) is to get the Scratch space, the Application code, and your Data onto separate spindles (drives). Because typical operation involves rapid shifting between reading code, reading and writing scratch data, and reading and writing primary data, by splitting these operations between drives, you don't have to wait as long for the heads to seek the next piece of data.

Here's an experiment: take a moderately large folder (the GarageBand Library folder at 1.3 Gb is convenient) and Duplicate it, timing how long it takes. Now, take the same folder and drag it to another hard drive (assuming you have two on the machine) You'll see it is almost twice as fast. That's because with 2 drives you're not forcing one set of heads to alternate continually between reading here and writing there. Drive A can read continuously, while Drive B can write continuously.

Note that Partitioning a single drive does nothing to help this performance issue, because although its two logical volumes, it is still the same set of physical heads.

So putting the System and the primary scratch space on your fastest drive (the Raptor) is the first step. If you are a mad Photoshop or FCP user, you can dedicate a Raptor to scratch space for the programs, but I think that's overkill. The OSX virtual memory scratch space will default to the boot drive anyway.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com

[laslane007]

My Photoshop usage can get up there, and I am currently in the middle of converting all my DVDs to h.264 files. Would that type of conversion benefit from a RAID 0 or 1 format?

[mhuie]

Originally Posted by laslane007

My Photoshop usage can get up there, and I am currently in the middle of converting all my DVDs to h.264 files. Would that type of conversion benefit from a RAID 0 or 1 format?

Unless you're frequently reading/writing 500+ meg photoshop files, setting up a RAID would be a waste of money.

Encoding/converting DVD's is probably the task that requires the LEAST amount of read/write speed. You could do that with the slowest drive on the market and not even notice.

Just get a large drive as your data drive, and a backup drive.

And I wouldn't recommend splitting your the OS, Applications and data onto different drives. You're going to run into problems. If you really want your OS to run faster, get another Raptor, and run it in RAID0, and keep the large drive for data, and have a backup drive.

[OreoCookie]

Originally Posted by laslane007

My Photoshop usage can get up there, and I am currently in the middle of converting all my DVDs to h.264 files. Would that type of conversion benefit from a RAID 0 or 1 format?

Zero, as long as you have space on your harddrive left.

[laslane007]

so converting DVDs to h.264 is just going to be slow no matter what, huh.

[OreoCookie]

The bottleneck is probably the DVD drive and/or the CPU.

Any harddrive you buy today outperforms DVD drives easily.

[laslane007]

Well, I'm actually ripping the DVD to my hard drive, and then converting to a h.264 from there. So the bottleneck is either the CPU or hard drive speed I would imagine.

[mhuie]

Originally Posted by laslane007

Well, I'm actually ripping the DVD to my hard drive, and then converting to a h.264 from there. So the bottleneck is either the CPU or hard drive speed I would imagine.

Ripping DVDs is dependent on the speed of the DVD drive. Converting to h.264 is CPU dependent. You will never need a fast hard drive for any of these tasks.

[astepanuks]

Another newbie qestion.
I have G4 Sawtooth whic is limited to 120 Gig drives (without a controler). I have 3 internal drives, one 120 Gig with system 10.3.9 and all Apps, 2nd 60 Gig drive which I use to back up my user files from 1st drive, 3rd drive 20 Gig mounted under DVD drive (I guess it is slowing the drive) for Classic which I rarely use. Finnaly, I have external 160 Gig drive in fire wire enclosure that I use for full back up of my 1st drive (on a weekly basis).
I don't want to spend any $ on controler cards. What are the best option to utilise my drives? Shall I set 1st and 2nd drive as Raid 0 using Apple's Free software solution and use external drive as back up of larger raided drive?
PS, my work is mainly non disk intensive tasks, but now and then I do some FCP, DVD ripping etc.
andy

[OreoCookie]

You cannot use any RAID except for JBOD (just a bunch of disks) which concatenates your drives. You won't see any performance gains at all. All you have is a larger volume. Because of the size of your drives, that won't make sense.

Especially with the stuff you do, you'll have zero benefits, but you increase the risk of failure of volumes.