March 2013 Reccomendations for RAID ARRAY editing R3D footage in CS6

[Adrian Jebef]

Adrian,

Putting two drives together to double the R/W speed.

At around 300-400 MB/S, per single drive, the drives could become a bottleneck in the future. I'm trying to completely eliminate that on my 4,1 system to keep it running 2-3 more years.

Would you mind running a Aja speed test on your SSD? Thanks in advance for taking the time!

I do see what you are saying and technically you're right, but you are not really going to see much of a performance increase from your boot drive between one SSD and two SSDs stripped in a Raid 0 config. You shouldn't be putting any project files or media directly on your boot drive. Leave those files on your scratch disk or Raid 5 archive. Here's the basic Mac Pro config:

1- 256GB+ SSD Boot Drive (if you are filling up over 100GB from Apps I'd be surprised)

2- Internal 4-Bay Raid 0 Scratch Disk (to ingest/copy/work from on a day to day project basis)

3- External mini-SAS Raid 5 Rack or Tower to archive and keep redundant backups of everything (this is your super-fast, super-big storage)

It's best to spend cheap money on #1 and #2 and invest the majority of your capital in #3.

 

[Will Keir]

Can I have 1 SSD in Bay 1, and three spinning SATA Drive in Bay 2, 3, 4?

I know you can't mix SAS and SATA but what about SSD? That's an SATA controller?

 

[Jason Osterday]

Yes, you can mount the SSD in Bay 1 as the system drive and RAID Bay's 2, 3, and 4 together. Its honestly worth throwing in the 4th drive in the raid and putting the OS SSD in the 5.25 bay under Optical drive though for increased bandwidth and raid size.

 

[Will Keir]

I'd either have to lose my Windows boot camp drive or the Optical drive. I don't use the optical drive often, but it seems to be useful still.

So the RAID of bay 2,3 & 4 can be with normal spinning SATA drives, 7,200 RPM?

Yes, you can mount the SSD in Bay 1 as the system drive and RAID Bay's 2, 3, and 4 together. Its honestly worth throwing in the 4th drive in the raid and putting the OS SSD in the 5.25 bay under Optical drive though for increased bandwidth and raid size.

 

[Will Keir]

The problem that I foresee is the limitation on a single SSD. Here are some benchmarks Read / Write speeds from an earlier thread on the subject.

- SATA III (via 1x Corsair 480GB SSD internal bay) 223.4 / 268.1
- SATA III (via 2x Corsair 480GB SSD as RAID 0 stripe array) 422.7 / 494.9

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...B-3-SSD-eSATA-SSD-Dock-2x-SSD-RAID-0-NAS-etc)
From experience and the advise of RUs, 300 MB/S is the minimum speed for hard drives to avoid a bottleneck. 6k Dragon might be more.

So unless I can find a single SSD with over 400 M/S, I'm going to need to raid two.

I do see what you are saying and technically you're right, but you are not really going to see much of a performance increase from your boot drive between one SSD and two SSDs stripped in a Raid 0 config. You shouldn't be putting any project files or media directly on your boot drive. Leave those files on your scratch disk or Raid 5 archive. Here's the basic Mac Pro config:

1- 256GB+ SSD Boot Drive (if you are filling up over 100GB from Apps I'd be surprised)

2- Internal 4-Bay Raid 0 Scratch Disk (to ingest/copy/work from on a day to day project basis)

3- External mini-SAS Raid 5 Rack or Tower to archive and keep redundant backups of everything (this is your super-fast, super-big storage)

It's best to spend cheap money on #1 and #2 and invest the majority of your capital in #3.

 

[Will Keir]

I think I got everything pretty much figured out except:

Bootup time of a SSD
Bootup time of a HDD RAID 0
Bootup time of a SSD RAID 0

Finally, to conserve power I often shut my computer down. I'd like to put it in sleep mode if possible but I hear this is bad for a RAID. Perhaps that was just the Raid card issue?

 

[Tim Jones]

Hi Will,

That's how I'm testing that as yet unreleased version of OS X. I installed it onto a separate OCZ Vertex 450 250GB SSD and swap my 10.8.4 disk for that for our Mavericks testing. The remaining 3, 2TB Constellation ES.2 drives are striped. Works well. FCP X and Motion are running well, but the Adobe suite won't run yet.

 

[Tim Jones]

My Mac Pro 4,1 with the normal 10.8.4 HD - 71 seconds from Grey spinner to login screen
Same machine with the SSD and Mavericks (same startup basics) - 23 seconds from grey spinner to login screen
The real improvement is during login - I run a lot of daemons and kexts that only load when I login as my primary account - that dropped from over 100 seconds to 14 seconds with the SSD.

I suspect that you will see a slight improvement with t halogen time using the SSD stripe, but as others mentioned, I'd save that money and spend it on your external big array.

 

[DJ Meyer]

Just got in a Promise J4 in with 4x 1.5 TB drives. 6 TB raw over T-bolt at 420 MB/s read and write. About the size of a Mac Mini.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

So unless I can find a single SSD with over 400 M/S, I'm going to need to raid two.

All the SATA connections inside the Mac Pro are 3Gbps anyway, so no matter how fast the SSD is, it's going to top out around 270MB/s read or write per connection. For reads on SSDs, this isn't a problem to reach that speed (or faster if the connection allows it), but write times on SSDs are still the weak part of the whole setup. Fastest you can go by using the 4 Mac Pro trays together is right about 1GB/s. It would take 4 fast SSD's and you wouldn't have much in the way of capacity, just speed.

Your best off to use all 4 trays for a RAID-0 and then have your primary system drive in the lower optical bay. You can create different partitions on that boot drive for various OS installations, boot camp, etc.. If you need a second drive, put it in the upper optical bay. You can always run your optical drive in an external USB enclosure. USB2.0 is fast enough for optical drives, even Blu-Ray can run at near 8X speed on a USB2.0 port.

 

[Will Keir]

I'm going to take that advise. I'm seeing SSDs with over 450 MB/s Read and Write, which is all I need to safely clear the bottleneck with R3D editing.

Thanks for everyone's contribution. I'll update the front page for anyone down the line looking for similar advise.

I'd save that money and spend it on your external big array.

 

[Will Keir]

ACK!

So that's why I was looking to RAID 0 the connections. So any SSD drives, even the fast ones over 500MB/s will only give me 270MB/s in my Mac Pro.
If I RAID 0 two SSDs I should get 2x270MB/s = 540MB/s then?

All the SATA connections inside the Mac Pro are 3Gbps anyway, so no matter how fast the SSD is, it's going to top out around 270MB/s read or write per connection.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

Just remember that an SSD's read/write speed of 450 MB/s is for compressible materials, in all reality its data rate for writing uncompressed material (i.e. video editing) will be around half that, maybe 225 - 250 MB/s, and it will have the same limitations as other SATA drives concerning I/O. The primary advantage of SSDs over spinning drives is the low latency, perhaps 0.1 - 1.0 ms vs a spinning drive latency of 4.0 - 12.0 ms.

It gets very technical, but basically SSD's make for very good system drives because it's mostly a read only application, but for mostly write applications (i.e. data backup and video processing/rendering) two or more 7k or 10k or 15k rpm server class drives in a RAID would be much more efficient, faster random write speeds, more reliable data integrity, and much more durable. In the case of a Mac Pro the 3 Gb/s limitation wouldn't severely limit most spinning drives anyway.

 

[Will Keir]

Since your SSD OS/Apps drive contains your Editing applications, don't you need this drive to be faster than the R3D speed bottleneck around 300MB/s?

It gets very technical, but basically SSD's make for very good system drives because it's mostly a read only application, but for mostly write applications (i.e. data backup and video processing/rendering) two or more 10k or 15k rpm server class 2.5" drives in a RAID would be much more efficient, faster random write speeds, more reliable data integrity, and much more durable.

 

[DJ Meyer]

Just remember that an SSD's read/write speed of 450 MB/s is for compressible materials, in all reality its data rate for writing uncompressed material (i.e. video editing) will be around half that, maybe 225 - 250 MB/s,

This is true for Sandforce based drives, not for most of the others.

 

[Will Keir]

Looking to purchase a couple drives, test their speeds in standard vs RAID 0 and give this thread a little update and it's conclusion.

 

[Tim Jones]

I'm using 4, Samsung EVO 840 1TB SSDs in a stripe and seeing a consistent 780MB/sec on a Thunderbolt rig and over 1300MB/sec connected directly to a Mac Pro 4,1. I'm also seeing 925MBW / 1020MBR with the same drives under Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 as a Dynamic / Striped volume connected via ATTO ExpressSAS H680.

 

[Eric Bowen]

5x Crucial M500 960GB drives in Raid 5 on Intel Dual Core LSI Chip controller runs at 1.8GB/s to 3GB/s with file sizes GB and higher. 2x Those960GB drives will give you 1GB/s to 1.2GB/s

The Marvell controllers an the Samsung controllers do not hae a speed difference with files that cant be compressed. Those controllers don't use a compression scheme for data.

 

[Will Keir]

For internal storage on a Mac Pro (4,1) I'm limited by the internal bus somewhere around 600 MB/S. So maybe I should be looking at older SSD models?

 

[Will Keir]

Just installed my 2x Samsung 840 Pro SSDs and found my speed to be slower than expected.
The 2x SSDs are in a RAID 0. I was expecting to see speeds around 900 MB/s or so. I'm also not able to select my RAID 0 directly, I have to navigate to my user folder to test the drives. I tried to use AJA System test but they don't even show as an option.

Using Mac Pro 2009 (4,1) plugged directly into internal HDD bays 1 & 2.

Write 487 MB/s
Read 509 MB/s

Kinda wondering if I somehow installed my RAID 0 incorrectly.

I'm using 4, Samsung EVO 840 1TB SSDs in a stripe and seeing a consistent 780MB/sec on a Thunderbolt rig and over 1300MB/sec connected directly to a Mac Pro 4,1. I'm also seeing 925MBW / 1020MBR with the same drives under Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 as a Dynamic / Striped volume connected via ATTO ExpressSAS H680.