[SOLVED] Recommend RAID-CPU & general questions.

[gamerbrehdy]

I am currently running a YouTube-channel. Not much, around 35 subs. But ALL of my content (used videomaterial, sfx, vfx, video-images and finished video-exports) are stored on a 500GB 7200RPM HDD (2.5”).

The drive is partially used by the raw videomaterial (220GB allready! I made just 10 videos).

This week tho, me and a friend disassembled some old office desktops and I was able to score two 500GB baracuda HDD’s and one 320GB Samsung HDD (all 3.5”) for free! My plan was to set up a little RAID-setup with and old mobo, PSU and RAM:

• 2x Barracuda 500GB 7200RPM in RAID0
- This is the drivespace where I’ll store all of my raw video- and audiomaterial. Putting it in RAID0 will give me 1TB of capacity.

• 1x Samsung 320GB 7200RPM + 1x WesternDigital 320GB 5400RPM (2.5”) in RAID1
- This is the drivespace where I have all my edited, rendered and exported content. I put it in RAID1 so that the data is safe and wont get lost in mechanical failure.

I also have a 120GB and 80GB SSD for a boot drive and footage-transfer from my editing/gaming pc to the RAID-storage. The 500GB SSD will be for my sfx, vfx and images

The spare components are:

• ASUS PRIME Z270-P
• Corsair VS650
• G.SKILL TridentZ RGB 16GB

I’m now left with 3 questions:

1. What CPU would be best to use in this setup? Nothing too overkill or overpriced, If celeron or pentium is possible, I’ll take it.

2. Would a RAID-setup like this work? I read that RAID with a 7200 and 5400 drive has some performance issues.

3. If it works, do I need a special PCI-e RAID-card? Again, nothing too overpriced.

 

[geofelt]

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
In fact, if your block of data were to be spanned on two drives, random times would be greater.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a older study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

And a newer report:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449-4.html

Spoiler... no benefit at all.

1. Here is the cpu support list for the motherboard:

｜｜ASUS USA

www.asus.com

I have no idea how much cpu power you need, nor how many threads.
Look up the passmark ratings for some of your candidate processors.

2. The only possible reason for a raid-0 setup would be to have one logical drive.
But, you can do that in windows. JBOD, I think it is called.

3. The Z270 motherboard will support raid. No raid card necessary.
That is a good thing because discrete raid cards can be expesnive. Regardless do not plan in raid.

 

[gamerbrehdy]

Raid-0 has been over hyped as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates.
It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small random reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.
In fact, if your block of data were to be spanned on two drives, random times would be greater.
There are some apps that will benefit. They are characterized by reading large files in a sequential overlapped manner.

Here is a older study using ssd devices in raid-0.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html

And a newer report:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449-4.html

Spoiler... no benefit at all.

1. Here is the cpu support list for the motherboard:

｜｜ASUS USA

www.asus.com

I have no idea how much cpu power you need, nor how many threads.
Look up the passmark ratings for some of your candidate processors.

2. The only possible reason for a raid-0 setup would be to have one logical drive.
But, you can do that in windows. JBOD, I think it is called.

3. The Z270 motherboard will support raid. No raid card necessary.
That is a good thing because discrete raid cards can be expesnive. Regardless do not plan in raid.

Thanks for the quick reply. I allready knew about that compatibilitylist for my z270-p, but nice to know that practically every cpu on there would work for storage management.

What would your advice be? Just to run the 500’s in RAID-0 and the 320’s in RAID-1 or just to run the 500’s separately and put the 320’s in RAID-1?

 

[geofelt]

My advice would be to not use raid-0 at all.
Just install the drives independently.
You could aggregate them logically if you wish.
No need for the overhead of raid and the likely negative performance impact.
For example, a record spread across two devices would require two reads, not one.

Also, I would not bother with raid-1.
The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. SSD devices are similar, if not better. That is something like 50 years.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, raid controller failure fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, and can tolerate some recovery time, you do not need raid-1

 

[mdd1963]

The little 120 GB and 80GB drives are both small enough to be just essentially just wasted SATA ports...(With an NVME drive in use, I believe most Z270 variants disable two of the typical 6 SATA ports)

Get an NVME for the OS and applications, and a perhaps a 2 TB Crucial MX500 as working 'scratch' space, and a pair (or more!) of 8-12 TB internal or external drives on sale for staggered backups. (I consider external USB drives convenient, and are often priced quite low, but, would never trust only a single drive for critical storage needs; disconnected USB backups, however, protect from potential ransomware attacks)

If your storage needs expand or are expected to expand greatly in the future perhaps a 4-6 bay NAS stuffed with 12-16 TB drives in RAID6 (allows two drives to fail without data loss)