Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
just brew it! wrote:I would hesitate to do a software (or motherboard) RAID-5 in his case, since it sounds like he frequently writes large batches of data to the RAID array. While faster CPUs have mitigated the issue quite a bit, RAID-5 without an intelligent RAID controller will still result in some performance loss.
just brew it! wrote:Have you figured out approximately how many MB/sec you're getting on the existing RAID-1? At the end of the day, unless you're running software RAID-5 or -6 (which can be limited by CPU speed), you're probably being bottlenecked by the transfer rate of the hard drives themselves, so a $150 RAID card probably won't help much.
Getting 4 drives and doing RAID-10 might get you a nice little boost though...
hiro_pro wrote:i know i am seeing 120 mbs write speeds.
Flying Fox wrote:How much are your "work" images and how much are your other stuff that you could not care less (movies and music)? I would say buy a separate drive, move those off to the new drive, and stay with your current setup. You probably want to do serious work on the SSDs anyway. This new drive can be the cheap "greens" if you want.
End User wrote:hiro_pro wrote:i know i am seeing 120 mbs write speeds.
Thats what see from my single WD greens. You could add more drives to your RAID 1 array to improve performance but from what I read that is up to the controller and not all controllers offer that performance increase.
The more immediate concern is the 30 second delay/lockup. The only thing I can think of is that you have set your drives to sleep after inactivity and the delay you are experiencing is the array waking up. The delay should only happen with the initial activity. The array should be immediately responsive after it has woken up. If the delay/lockup is happening with every copy it might be best just to buy a big drive (or two to backup your backups) and retire your array.
I've got photos archived onto a 3TB green on a Windows 8 rig. I just did a test with a folder that contain 2700 10 MP NEF images. After all the thumbnails were generated for the first time they appear instantly when I go back to that folder.
Don't work off of your backup/archive drive. I would buy another SSD to use as a work in progress drive. Once you are done editing move them over to your long term storage solution.
hiro_pro wrote:maybe i need to go back and look at NEF's from some older cameras. i know the drives are choking on folders with larger files.
Waco wrote:I wonder if it's set to not cache them? Isn't that a per-folder setting in Vista/7/8?
prb123 wrote:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816118106 - w/ Cache - Enable Write Cache, buy a good UPS (I like Eaton Equipment).
hiro_pro wrote:i guess the other question is how raid-able is a WD black drive?
Flatland_Spider wrote:You probably shouldn't if your concerned about your data. The WD Blacks have consumer firmware that isn't optimized for RAID arrays, and it will cause them to be dropped from the array quicker then if they had RAID firmware. Don't get me wrong, it's doable. It's just not the greatest idea when you need data security.
cphite wrote:Frankly, I would drop RAID altogether... RAID is all about up-time. You've got backups going to Carbonite - if something should happen to your local drive, it's an inconvenience, yes; but it's not like you're doing business on that machine and losing money while it's down.
Honestly, unless you're just really keen on using RAID because you find it interesting or whatever, it just seems like an added level of complexity that really doesn't buy you much. As long as you're doing regular backups, which it sounds like you are.
Waco wrote:cphite wrote:Frankly, I would drop RAID altogether... RAID is all about up-time. You've got backups going to Carbonite - if something should happen to your local drive, it's an inconvenience, yes; but it's not like you're doing business on that machine and losing money while it's down.
Honestly, unless you're just really keen on using RAID because you find it interesting or whatever, it just seems like an added level of complexity that really doesn't buy you much. As long as you're doing regular backups, which it sounds like you are.
If there are regular backups and a little downtime from a bad drive is acceptable...RAID 0 all the way.
Waco wrote:I keep hearing this but I can tell you that we use consumer drives in very large RAID 5 and 6 arrays and they very rarely drop out from the horrors people attribute to them.