A RAID that just works - no matter what

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I'm running 4gb but I could change it to 8gb. I have a friend with a very similar system but he's got an ssd boot drive and his machine is a lot smoother and the framerate is consistently higher. The minimum drive speed for cod6 is 150mb/s if you want a smooth gameplay.
 
It's real simple. You have the performance manager running while you shoot through the south american slums map and it will tell you what the hard drive was running at. You don't need a link to find that.
 
Telling me to look it up myself is not providing a link. I don't even have the game to check this out on. But think about what you are trying to claim. Most gamers use physical disks in a non raid setup. RAID0 or 5 or SSDs are not the norm that I'm aware of. (I would say to check out the steams survey results if you don't believe me, but they dont' list the how the drives are setup.) Are you actually trying to tell me that all these gamers aren't getting smooth/playable frame rates because they lack a "drive" that can transfer 170MBps? I have read several reviews of the PC version of this game and can't find one that says you need anything like what your talking about. The only complaint I could find online that was even close to this was the frequent auto save feature. Not because of a frame drop, but because it kicks in so often that he found himself having to start over because the last auto save didn't go back far enough to get him out of danger.

Again, most of us aren't using RAID or SSDs, and none of the PC reviews I read for this game complained about what your talking about. A game is loaded into memory, and stays there until the next load point. No one would make a game that needs a 170MBps read drive, there are to few of them out there.
 
Just get one of these.
http://www.emc.com/products/detail/hardware/symmetrix-dmx-4.htm
They work really well.
Then if you want bulletproof have another one in a completely different site.

I don't mean to joke or be harsh, but having a bulletproof storage solution requires a high level of effort to setup and a decent level of effort to administer. There is no such thing as a RAID that is indestructable. The ones you build in your computer have a single point of failure, which is EVERY part in your computer that is not your hard drives. The cheap NAS's, drobos etc, also have the same problem. Better ones have redundant power supplies. The best have dual connections to hard drives, dual controllers, dual power suppliers, dual links to your computer, the list goes on. At home, it is good practice to not rely on RAID as a cure all. It can be protection against drive failure and that is my limit of trust with it. My most important stuff is backed up outside of my computer. Even a hardware raid solution can have problems, you can lose two drives in a RAID 5 at the same time, I have seen it at work. RAID 10 is good, it rebuilds muuuch faster than RAID 5. Both of them can have problem and rebuilding an array makes things go slow for a while. You are also not thinking about catastrophe's. My parents computer was nearly lost due to water entering the house. No raid can protect against that. There are fires, lightning strikes, theft, and catastrophic computer failures that can hit all of your drives. My approach, RAID 5 for data, single disk with OS, and a 320 GB external drive that contains an image of my hard drive, and a copy of all my photos and priceless data. The photos are also on DVDs and not in my apartment. I lose a RAID 5 drive, I can still work, just order another hard drive and rebuild. I lose the OS drive, I order another one and re-image. My computer is totally destroyed or stolen. I suck it up, rebuild the OS from scratch, and then put my mp3 collection back together from my book full of CD's in the closet when I have spare time. Then I drive to the parents house and pick up my binder of photos and put them back on the computer too. That is a lot of work but I dont want to spend the money to have an off site backup that holds a copy of my data in the rare event of catastrophe. What is best for you depends on your storage requirements and how much of your data is not replaceable and of course how much you are willing to spend.
Best of luck.
 
At home, it is good practice to not rely on RAID as a cure all. It can be protection against drive failure and that is my limit of trust with it.
Click to expand...

Home or work, thats the EXACT reason RAID was developed at all. It protects your web/transaction server so that it can stay up in the event of a drive failure. Thats all RAID was ever meant to do.
 
RAID is for higher availability not full data protection. At work, if your customers are paying for you to protect their data and have it available, you have RAID and offline backup to meet both of these needs. I have seen RAID 5's fail, in some hardware you will not order from newegg. What saved millions of dollars in work was a good old tape backup. It was faster than rebuilding a degraded RAID 5 array too.
 
Rofl,

8 month old bumb, I guess a few people had New Years storage resolutions. Thanks guys for the advice. Installing a new server for work and wasn't sure the way to go, but your insight was very helpful and I have a plan now!
 
I came across the issue here as I am also looking for a home storage server. I am no nerd at all so I asked a friend who is and more or less we came to the issues mentioned above - software Rais has problems, hardware as well (they had eg a second controller to find out it was DOA...). In the end we found for protection issues an external HDD is just fine and then take a backup (I use Cobian) programme and make copies in reasonable intervalls. The point is that an external USB/SATA HDD doe not rely on the software/ hardware. You just plug it to another computer no matter what happens. For the cases described above I thought about trying a client plus the cloud. I.e. backup to Amazon S3 or any other provider. That is only fine when your data is encrypted. Currently I am checking Teamdrive as it is certified by a German offical whatsoever - means you can be quite sure there is no backdoor.

One consideration not made above is concerning which data (and which amount) is really critical and has to be accessed quickly. For sure not your vidoes and pictures (if you are not working the press etc). I assume for most people it is a bunch for word, excel files and this and that amounting to maybe some 5 GB. And maybe then it is really worth using a simple tape to back that up. So you would end up with a partition of the real important data and back it up daily on tape. You have a partition with the OS and use Acronis True image - I use an external 2.5 inch HDD SATA/USB drive and from time to time burn it on DVD (and of course use Taiyo Yuden and burn slowly and verify...). And finally you have the x-TBs with Photos, MP3s, Video etc. Therefore you use an external HDD to backup. Maybe in 2010 we get cheap and realiable Blu Ray writers.

I also thought about fiddeling with Freenas (with or without ZFS). Well, as a political scientist I am not sure if I get that right... And it comes to another point - it is possible to build a system that takes some 20-30 watts in idle mode. But that depends on many things. And many work under Windows only...

In short - storage seems not be a non trivial issue!
 
Hello,
I am, as many of you like to refer to, an "enthusiast" who simply wants to get the best performance from his hardware. I have a Phenom II based system with DDR3 ram, 2 WD150GB 10,000 rpm raptor drives and 1 500GB sata drive, and have just ordered Adobe CS5 Master Suite. How would YOU guys configure such a system to maximize video editing performance? What drive should the OS (Win7 x64) be put on? What drive shoudl the programs be put on? (I do my backups on an external drive)

Thanks in advance!

Middle age enthusiast...
 
Hi,

sorry not an expert in that either but (there is always a but ;-)

- I assume for editing videos CPU performance and RAM is most important in respect to speed. I assume at least 4 GB RAM should be used. Would only go for more if you really need it.

- I do not know how much HDD space you need for the video data but usually quite a lot. I would put the OS on the raptors and the data on the 1.5 TB. I am not sure why you bought two raptors. For RAID? I guess I would rather install the OS on one raptor, configure everything then take Acronis Trueimage or similar and make a backup on a regulat basis. If you are lazy you put in on the 1.5 TB HDD. You should then however write it on DVD once in a while (in case both HDD get broken for whatever reason.) I would format the second raptor make a partition exactly matching the one with the OS and then keep it in a cool and dry place... When the OS HDD fails than with changing HDD and playing back after an hour you should be done. What is nice for that kind of back is a 2.5 SATA drive in a case with E-SATA and an E-SATA plug at your motherboard (no idea what the English word but in that way that a cable goes to the outside so you can plug in there) - backup on SATA drive is much faster than on USB. If you use Trumeimage or similar - make sure you check the box "Verify after backup" so that it checks that the backup was made properly.

I know that my collegue makes all video editing with a Mac Book Pro (2 years old). So I assume with your hardware you should not worry...

Christian

 
Thanks Christian. Again, backup is not a huge issue as I have USB 3.0 built in to my MB and do my backups on an external drive. This is more about getting the best performance from the actual task of editing.
 
As much as I like to put the Drobos in the same shelf as other overly expensive and mediocre performing products like those from Bose or Apple, they do have some attractive qualities.

The newer Drobos like the Drobo S offer dual redundancy like RAID 6, which I think is important. In RAID 5 and even RAID 1, any failures during the rebuild period and you can lose everything. With RAID 6/ Drobo's Dual Redundancy mode, a failure during a rebuild still affords you RAID 5-level single-disk failure protection. And the Drobo is data aware and rebuild times depend on the amount of data you have, unlike traditional RAID's need to rebuild the entire disk, which can make the rebuild quicker in theory.

And there is the issue of bit-rot, where the data on the harddrive is altered on its own. The Drobos perform a checksum on every read due to the nature of its storage virtualization system and can detect unexpected data changes. I've seen some RAID cards offer scheduling of refresh scans of the array to make sure all the redundant data matches the actual data.

How do people protect against failure during a RAID 1 rebuild? Is there a version of RAID 1 where a copy of the data is duplicated onto two other disks instead of one?

The first Drobos were a complete joke with their 10-20MB/s speed, but the Drobo S' 80MB/s speed makes it just fast enough to be not annoying. Too bad about the Drobo S' $800 price with zero drives and annoying requirement for Port Multiplier support. I suppose one can justify the price saying that a good RAID controller and drive case will cost one at least $500-$600, but they forget to say that it will perform at least 4 times faster.

Now, why the heck does hardware RAID cards cost so much? It's not as if the silicon is particularly complex and dense, especially when compared to current CPUs and GPUs. Sure it's a custom single-purpose chip, but should it cost several times more than a CPU built with 32nm 400 million transistors? I would not be surprised if those chips were designed at least 10 years ago. I'm convinced it is related to the low-volume business-oriented market. Given that, the Drobo's looks even more overpriced, since they contain general purpose CPUs and RAM to run their BeyondRAID algorithm. What makes hardware RAID cards so special that it outpaces software raid running on general purpose Multi-core 3+GHz CPU and 8+GB of ram?

I do like seeing a fault-tolerant storage system like the Drobo that is designed to 'just work' for everyone, but too bad it's priced for the elite.
 
> The newer Drobos like the Drobo S offer dual redundancy like RAID 6, which I think is important. In RAID 5 and even RAID 1, any failures during the rebuild period and you can lose everything.

I agree that this is really critical for large arrays. With the unrecoverable read error rate of some consumer hard drives being 1 in every 10^14 bits read, the chances of having your RAID 5 array be unrecoverable actually gets to be more than 50% once your array size gets beyond a few TB.


> The first Drobos were a complete joke with their 10-20MB/s speed, but the Drobo S' 80MB/s speed makes it just fast enough to be not annoying.

That speed isn't reasonable considering the real-time data integrity checking.
 


If someone runs their system with ZFS Raid-z doesn't that take care of unrecoverable bit errors? Also some consumer hard drives (like the WD Green drives, I believe) actually have a UBE of 1 every 10^15 bits, which helps a lot.
 
> If someone runs their system with ZFS Raid-z doesn't that take care of unrecoverable bit errors?

I'm not all that familiar with ZFS, but my understanding of Raid-z is that there's only one redundancy volume, and if so then you'd still have the same vulnerability to unrecoverable sectors. It seems to me that you'd need to go to Raid-z2 to solve that problem.


> Also some consumer hard drives (like the WD Green drives, I believe) actually have a UBE of 1 every 10^15 bits, which helps a lot.

You're absolutely correct. The problem is that people who are using RAID are often after better performance and go for the Black drives which have the lower reliability spec. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use RAID-5 if performance is your main concern, but judging from the posts I've seen a lot of people know just enough to be dangerous and RAID is very much a technology where what you don't know will come back to bite you.
 
I maintain 32 of my own servers.

This is what I tend to do, and it makes sense for *servers*.

Cheap 16 GB flash card or SSD drive. These can be cheap as chips. Again, as people have said, 'once it's in RAM.'
This is my boot drive. I hide these inside the spare bays since they are so tiny.

Then I load out every hot swap bay with drives. I like my approach because instead of having a RAID 1 OS drive, I free up two bays to be in my RAID arrays. If I get really paranoid about my boot drive, I just image the drive and have one on stand by for immediate plug in. For the OS only, you could almost compare it to a 'dated' Mirror drive. And since the OS doesn't update unless I tell it to... it might as well be RAID 1.

For file servers, my most massive one uses 3x Raid cards, each holding 24 drives. Each array is RAID 6. I tie them together with distributed file systems. I have two of these syncing across two data centers.

My database servers use RAID 10 with 15k drives.

my web blades boot off the network, they are completely headless and drive less. Saves a butt load of cash on drives.
 
I am a home user with growing storage needs I have allot of large files which may be irreplaceable. I run a media server connected to my tv and a laptop on a wireless router.
Honestly, I have not been backing up my 3+ gigs of data contained on a 2tb 1tb 500gb and 300gb drive. I believe that there will be a surge in demand for a solution from people in a similar situation. I have been looking for an economical solution. I do not like the idea of buying a raid card or on-board raid that may fail rendering all my drives useless, not to mention all drives have to be the same size..most attractive feature of a drobo or software raid that they don't.

No solution seems palatable to me, but I see that I really need to do something with the concern of hd loss and viruses.
I want to thank all the posters for their valuable input here. No raid or drobo will protect from a malicious virus either.

At this point in time, I think my best options are either to build a networked pc for backup purposes or to get an external hd enclosure and do backups. The problem with this is keeping track of files I need to back up. I am very poor at performing maintenance and keeping track of this stuff.

I am not going to backup windows as on occasion it is better to have a fresh install. When I think about it, by the time I buy 2 more 2 tb drives to run a raid retiring my smaller ones, I can buy the same 2 and have complete offline backup, not to mention the lack of hd bays on my pc.. I can actually put another drive there if needed.

This problem has been around since the first hd.. I remember doing backups to flopies, you would think there should be a decent solution by now. MS should also be embarased that they have not enabled raid 5 for the average user because this is not just a corporate server problem. It would help allot of people growing their media centers.
 
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