Four SATA 3Gbps drives or two SATA 6Gbps drives in RAID 0?

[apriest]

I have four aging Seagate ST31000528AS (Barracuda 7200.12 1TB 7200 rpm 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s) drives in a RAID 0 array on an Intel P55 chipset. I edit thousands of photos at a time for timelapse photography with Lightroom, After Effects, Premiere Pro, etc. I'm upgrading to a Z77 chipset and I'm wondering how two Western Digital WD20EFRX ("Red" 2TB 7200 rpm 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s) drives in a RAID 0 array on 6Gb/s ports would compare? I'm betting my older drives with four spindles would still be faster?

Also, I'm not sure if what I'm doing is more sequential or random disk activity, nor do I know how to find out.

 

[Coup27]

What's the average file size of the thousands of photos you edit?

 

[apriest]

The RAW .nef files from my Nikon D700 are about 14-16MB. Lightroom reads these files but does not write to them. Instead it writes a small 3-16KB .xmp file for each photo with the edits. When I export as .tiffs to work in other programs they are anywhere from 35-70MB apiece for 8 or 16-bit uncompressed TIFFs. It can take some time to export several hundred of these. I often leave them uncompressed if they are temp files to stitch into a panorama or render into a timelapse movie. If they are long term archives I use zip compression within the TIFF (more CPU cycles though). Some projects can be 40GB+ in temp files until final render. I usually keep the final render, original RAW files, edit files (small .xmp files), and delete all the intermediate large files that could be easily recreated to save storage on the backups.

Looking at this year's data, my largest single file sizes are 10-15GB (gigapixel panoramas), and my largest projects are 50-75GB, consisting of 4,000 to 5,000 single images. I should also mention that my boot volume with Windows 7 and my applications consists of two Intel X25-M 80GB SSDs in a RAID 0 on the two 3Gbps ports I have. The hard drives are on 1.5Gbps ports I think. I don't have enough free space on the C drive to use as temporary storage for Photoshop or Premiere, so my scratch volumes are my large D RAID array (when ideally the scratch volume should be separate from the footage). I also have 8GB of RAM which is very limiting on these large panoramas and timelapses. Hence why I'm going to a Z77 chipset to get to 32GB RAM with a 3rd gen Core i7. The new motherboard will have 2x 6Gbps ports and 4x 3Gbps ports (plus 2 more Marvell 6Gbps ports, but I'd rather my RAID be on the Intel RST). I will probably upgrade my boot and application stripe to two 256GB Samsung 840 Pros in RAID 0 because it will give me enough room to work right off the SSDs on smaller projects and then export back to my hard drive array which I manually synchronize to external storage a few times a day, whenever I'm at a stable point in my projects.

 

[TemjinGold]

The 6Gbps interface will make 0 difference for spindles.

 

[Coup27]

I think your workload is more sequentially biased but there are elements of random in it. Hard drive speeds have not changed a great deal in the last couple of generations and as no hard drive can reach anywhere near 6Gbps, 4 in raid0 will be faster than 2 on 6Gbps ports.

If you are going all out on a new system, the 840 Pro is a good choice for a new OS drive. Personally when I raid0'd 2x 830's I didn't see a great real benefit but your workload will be a lot more taxing than mine so if you have the budget you'll have a great OS experience and scratch pad for your photo editing.

I would however recommend the WD Black series instead of the Red. The Red is designed for a 24/7 NAS environment which means it varies the speeds of the motors to compensate for the workload and overall power consumption. WD's website lists the RPM of the drive as "Intellipower" - I don't know how stable this will be with 4 of them in raid0. The WD Black however is their performance orientated consumer HDD with a constant RPM of 7,200. As you want 2TB drives, that rules out the VelociRaptor.

Are you intending to overclock this system? If not, you can save yourself some cash and get a H77 chipset instead. But I would get 2 840 Pro's and put them on the 2 Intel 6Gbps ports and get 4 2TB WD Blacks and put them each on an Intel 3Gbps port. If there are any Intel 3Gbps ports left use one for your optical drive, if not, use one of the Marvell's. Don't use the Marvell ports for anything other than your optical drive as they're crap.

 

[apriest]

The 6Gbps interface will make 0 difference for spindles.

Correct, but I'd be moving my four existing 3Gbps drives from 1.5Gbps ports to 3Gbps, or replacing them with two Western Digital RED drives (where the 6Gbps would be making no difference). I'm betting four older 1TB drives would be faster than two newer 2TB drives in RAID 0 due to having more spindles?

 

[VirtualLarry]

four older 1TB drives would be faster than two newer 2TB drives in RAID 0 due to having more spindles?

Yes.

 

[apriest]

Yes, I was planning on using the Marvell ports for my Bluray and DVD burners. Strangely, my Bluray burner does not work on my current Marvell 1.5Gbps port when my DVD burner does, even though both can be seen fine in the BIOS. Many others have reported this as a driver bug, but it has never been resolved. Hopefully I won't have this problem on a newer Marvell controller.

I won't be overclocking (already I push the CPU to 80%+ for hours at a time with a good air cooler in an Antec P190). The Z77 has Thunderbolt, and if I stay with my current 3yr refresh cycle, I might find it useful for faster backups.

Currently 2x256GB is cheaper than 1x512GB with 840 Pros, and I really want to get to the half a TB range to edit smaller projects directly off the SSDs and then export the finished project back to hard drives. Maybe two striped would get a small performance boost too, I don't know. It sounds like trim has been resolved on newer chipsets with RAID though? Never really been a big problem with my X25-Ms honestly.

I've read the WD Blacks don't do well in an external hardware RAID setup because they have pretty aggressive timeouts and can easily drop a drive in a RAID array? I may eventually get one or two Sans Digital TR5UT+B enclosures because single 3TB drives aren't large enough to hold a complete backup of everything, and I hate having a different hard drive for every other year. What happens is the older stuff sits on a shelf and never gets accessed so you never know how solid the backup is. Maybe rotating two RAID 5 arrays and keeping one offsite would be better? That isn't cheap though, hence why I was pondering a TR5UT+B, but they are pretty specific on using RAID enterprise drives like Seagate Constellation ES and Western Digital RE-3. Not cheap. Some have reported using Reds in them just fine. Thunderbolt enclosures are too expensive for me right now, and there aren't a lot of choices in the market yet either.

At any rate, looks I'll be sticking with my four Barracuda 7200.12 internally for awhile, since they won't work in a Sans Digital TR5UT+B and nothing else will be appreciably faster. They are about 3/4 full (with some temp files I can delete), and I expect one of the drives will fail at some point in the near future being 3yrs old. Hard to make good storage decisions...

 

[Coup27]

Two 256GB SSD's in raid0 on your workload will yield a performance advantage over a single 512GB so if they are cheaper too then go that route.

TRIM is enabled on the 7 series of motherboards using Intel standard drivers so aslong as you use the latest Intel RST you will be fine.

I have not heard about that and I was on the assumption that being a constant RPM performance drive it would be ideal for raid. This is the first mention of an external raid however, I thought you were using the mobo onboard raid? I'm a bit confused now. Are the HDD's for your raid inside your computer or are they for your backup? Blacks for the internal workstation raid would be perfect I thought?

Backup is a headache period. The cloud solves a lot of backup headaches but with the volume of data you need to save it's totally impractical. I think you know your options already so it's the best of a bad bunch.

 

[apriest]

Yeah, sorry for the confusion! I meant that I was trying to weigh my options on what I currently have and whatever I'll get. To be flexible, it would be nice to be able to use whatever I get in another fashion over the next three years, likely that will be in an external RAID array, so it impacts my purchasing decision today. Currently my four Barracuda 7200.12 drives are internal, and are not supported in the Sans Digital TR5UT+B enclosure I was looking at. Unfortunately, WD Blacks are not either, but some have reported Reds are (although officially they are not validated yet by Sans Digital). My external Barracuda XT 2 and 3TB drives are not officially validated either even though some report they work, but I don't have enough of them of the same size to use in a RAID array. Anyway... I'm rambling now... Since I'm going to stick with my four internal drives currently and get two larger SSDs to speed up editing, maybe I should start a new topic asking opinions on cheaper but reliable RAID arrays for backups? Cloud is definitely not an option for me yet (I've looked into Amazon Glacier, but cost per month is too high for me to justify at this point in my business and high speed Internet is not very reliable in my remote town anyway).

 

[apriest]

About the WD Blacks: they have TLER or time-limited error recovery disabled, and thus do not work well in a RAID array.

 

[Coup27]

I stand corrected, my apologies.

 

[apriest]

Didn't mean that as a rebuttal, if it came across that way! I wouldn't have known myself if it weren't for people sharing info on forums though. WD says nothing on their packaging. Grrrrrr!

 

[Coup27]

lol no I wasn't being sarcastic. Personally I don't use raid's as they don't benefit my usage model so I don't pay a lot of attention to raid related technology. I have just been doing a bit of reading on the red's and TLER so I understand the tech a bit better now. I'm just as happy when I'm wrong because it means I have learned something I didn't know. WD does state on the red product page:

"Intelligent error recovery - With built in intelligent error recovery controls, NASware also prevents hard drives from being dropped off the RAID due to extended error recovery. This provides more availability and less down time rebuilding the RAID"

So yeah, red's would be a better choice for raids.

 

[apriest]

The cost difference between a WD Red and RE4 is about $25. Or $100 for a 4 drive array. Enough to ponder the differences. I wonder what the performance difference would be between four RE4s on a Z77 chipset in RAID 0 vs. four on a good external hardware array over USB 3.0 (such as the TR5UT+B) in RAID 5? Obviously the RAID 5 array will have better redundancy, but at what performance hit? Maybe it would be acceptable enough to do live editing on? I'm currently getting 203MB/s read and 135MB/s write with my four Barracuda 7200.12's in RAID 0 on a P55 chipset. (Sequential obviously... 4K random is pathetic, 0.47MB/s and 1.86MB/s.)

 

[kbp]

Can you IRST or accelerate a RAID array? If so you might want to pick up an additional 128 SSD accelerate your spinners and use the other half of this drive as a cache drive for Lightroom, After Effects, Premiere Pro, etc.

 

[apriest]

I could, and I've thought of it, but I wouldn't have enough SATA ports on the Intel chipset unless I used one SSD for C and a second for caching. I think two striped for C would do more for me, unless someone has some data for me showing otherwise. I might test a few scenarios before settling on a particular configuration.

 

[apriest]

I doubt SSD caching would offer much benefit to my photo editing though on the RAID array... not likely to hit the cache too often, and I'd rather know the files were written and saved before syncing to external backup right afterward.

 

[tweakboy]

Go for the sata 3gbps drives. sata3 only improves by 25mbps on average. from 100mbps to 125mbps.

gl

 

[groberts101]

another alternative would be to add another smaller 128GB SSD(or in your case I would run those x25's in R0 to still make use of them) and then use Fancycache to build a hybrid drive setup with that 4 drive array. You could easily test it out and see what gains may be possible for you on a newer build. Also has much more flexibility than Intels caching software.
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/index.html

Of course it's not as fast as a larger ramdisk(and I would still leverage that on your newer build).. but worlds better than running out of system ram during heavier workloads/filesizes like you're dealing with on occasion. I've used it with my 8 drive Cuda array(same drives that you have).. and it certainly does speed up workflows, especially for the more infrequently accessed data that may get bumped out of cache by the time you roll back around to it again.

And personally.. I'd use a cheaper raid card to run those 4 drives in R0 while keeping those Intel ports open for larger single drives(redundancy for your R0) and use the Marvell's for whatever else you may need. Highpoint 2720(8 drive).. or even the older 640(4 drive).. and newer faster Marvell chip'd 640L(4 drive) are decent enough for the price. I still use the 2720 after swapping it out for the 640 I tested and have never lost an array with either card. There are plenty of other entry level cards that fit a 4 drive HDD array running less compute intensive R0 just as well.

 

[apriest]

I have pondered an LSI 9240-8i with CacheCade using an SSD for an internal RAID 0 array. I need to invest more in external offsite backups first though. Thinking of a CRU DataPort (Wiebetech) RTX430-3QR at the moment since my single 3TB backup drives are completely full. I'd go Promise Pegasus with Thunderbolt, but this would be my only computer with Thunderbolt and that puts me at risk of not reading my data if it crashes. Also, I'm not sure how stable Thunderbolt and Windows is yet either...