March 2013 Reccomendations for RAID ARRAY editing R3D footage in CS6

[Alex Kiritz]

so when buying SSDs for a Raid 0. What should I be looking for?

Just make sure it's not actually a box of termites running around chewing your data into a piece of wood.

 

[Will Keir]

anyone else without termite troubles on their mind? :thumbdown:

 

[Will Keir]

Thinking about building an INTERNAL RAID 0 with at least two SSDs. Wondering which drives are working best for anyone out there that has done the same.

Thanks in advance for the advice. :cheers2:

so when buying SSDs for a Raid 0. What should I be looking for?

 

[Will Keir]

What is a good SSD to use for an internal RAID 0? I've heard I should stay away from SSD's with the Sandybridge technology. Any recommendations?

 

[Will Keir]

Looking to build an internal SSD RAID 0 (2 drives):

1) Faster response from sleep/inactivity
2) Faster boot times
3) Transportability, better protection against data loss and drive failure.

What SSDs are reliable and fast? Do I want to avoid SANDYBRIDGE chipsets? Why?

I thought about doing what Jeff Kilroe does, 4 RAID 0 7200 RPM drives. The bottom line is I have an Apple Raid Card with SAS 15,000 RPM drives and I need the extra spot for a Rocket X card.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Adrian Jebef]

Looking to build an internal SSD RAID 0 (2 drives):

1) Faster response from sleep/inactivity
2) Faster boot times
3) Transportability, better protection against data loss and drive failure.

What SSDs are reliable and fast? Do I want to avoid SANDYBRIDGE chipsets? Why?

I thought about doing what Jeff Kilroe does, 4 RAID 0 7200 RPM drives. The bottom line is I have an Apple Raid Card with SAS 15,000 RPM drives and I need the extra spot for a Rocket X card.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

I still don't get why you want a Raid 0 SSD array for your MacPro. A single 256GB Samsung 840 as a boot drive will give you plenty of performance for the price. Trying to put two 512GB or 960GB SSDs together in a Raid 0 stripe seems like complete overkill. You may find that holding on to that Apple Raid card with the 15,000 RPM drives is actually just slowing you down. As Jeff suggested earlier simply stripping (4) 2TB Drives as an internal Raid 0 will give you great performance and 8TB of local storage. I use this setup in all 3 of my Mac Pros.

 

[Will Keir]

What's your bootup time? Do you have delays from wake mode?

As Jeff suggested earlier simply stripping (4) 2TB Drives as an internal Raid 0 will give you great performance and 8TB of local storage. I use this setup in all 3 of my Mac Pros.

 

[Adrian Jebef]

What's your bootup time? Do you have delays from wake mode?

I use 256GB Samsung 840 SSDs as my boot drives. I'm running 10.8.4 and my systems are pretty responsive. What are you using right now as your boot drive?

 

[Tim Jones]

I use 256GB Samsung 840 SSDs as my boot drives. I'm running 10.8.4 and my systems are pretty responsive. What are you using right now as your boot drive?

We've tested a lot of different models and we've standardized on either the OCZ Vertex 450 drives, or the Samsung EVO units (the PROs are okay too). The best thing about the Samsung EVO line is that you can get a 1TB drive from around 70 cents per GB.

Both brands are very fast and have very high MTBF and repeated Read/Write cycle ratings.

BTW - my personal Mac Pro systems (4,1 and 2,1) have 4 Seagate Constellation ES.2 and ES.3 drives striped and they're bloody fast. My rMBP just got a new striped array of 4, 512 Samsung EVO drives via Thunderbolt. 812MB/sec W/R - Zoom!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

No need for SSD RAID-0 here. You really won't gain anything. If you're concerned about wake-up times, it will actually be a few milliseconds slower with the RAID. And you should not be experiencing any wake-up time issues with SSDs. Or at least not anything that should be any issue. I'm also having great results with the OCZ Vertex SSDs. Samsung EVO SSDs are nice and economical and still plenty fast for the 3Gbps SATA connection in the Mac Pro.

My Mac Pros have an optical drive in the top bay, an SSD in the lower bay for OSX and apps, then 4 x 2~3 TB HDD's in a RAID stripe for fast workspace -- 400MB/s+ with the latest crop of 3TB HDDs. My Mac Pro 5,1 uses a 512GB Samsung 830 SSD and it's been running great for over 18 months.

I would avoid any SSDs that use a SandForce chipsets (not Sandy Bridge, that's an Intel CPU architecture). While they continue to get better, and some companies even tune them rather well (OWC, for example), they fall short when moving large blocks of compressed data, Like R3D files. When it all comes down to it, SandForce isn't bad, it just won't live up to the advertised numbers. Not in a serious environment and they can often be unpredictable in terms of transfer speeds, especially writes.

There's always the Fusion I/O PCIe SSDs to consider as well. These give the best performance. They're not really much faster than what's out there in SATA form, but they have amazingly solid sustained read and write performance. The down-side is cost and that they take up a precious PCIe slot.

I use external RAID-5 / RAID-6 setups for larger storage, but the RAID-0 as primary workspace within the Mac tower just can't be beat and it's super cheap. If you're running such an array in your Mac, make sure you don't allow the system to put HDD's to sleep. The drives can sleep if your system does, but not on your own. You'll find that becomes a real hassle at times if it puts them to sleep, then they all have to spin-up and sync. ugh.

 

[Phil Holland]

Got the PM Will. Pretty much what everybody here is saying. The Samsung's seem to pretty popular and perform well. Used one pretty recently. If the pure goal is fast application launch and start up that's pretty much what you'll get with this.

We had some Seagate enterprise class SSDs through here not long ago that was pretty great. Gotta look up the model on that, but it was used in a larger array of drives.

Remember though if it's booting up a program and say loading up 2200 clips into a bin or something, while the program will launch quick the drives and other I/O bottle necks will get in the way if the media is coming from something slow.

 

[Will Keir]

Thanks Phil, much appreciated.

Got the PM Will. Pretty much what everybody here is saying. The Samsung's seem to pretty popular and perform well. Used one pretty recently. If the pure goal is fast application launch and start up that's pretty much what you'll get with this.

We had some Seagate enterprise class SSDs through here not long ago that was pretty great. Gotta look up the model on that, but it was used in a larger array of drives.

Remember though if it's booting up a program and say loading up 2200 clips into a bin or something, while the program will launch quick the drives and other I/O bottle necks will get in the way if the media is coming from something slow.

 

[Will Keir]

Using an Apple Raid Card with 3x 15,000 RPM SAS drives. It's takes a second to spin up and I believe it's bad to put a RAID like mine into sleep mode?

I use 256GB Samsung 840 SSDs as my boot drives. I'm running 10.8.4 and my systems are pretty responsive. What are you using right now as your boot drive?

 

[Will Keir]

Perfect, thanks so much Tim!

We've tested a lot of different models and we've standardized on either the OCZ Vertex 450 drives, or the Samsung EVO units (the PROs are okay too). The best thing about the Samsung EVO line is that you can get a 1TB drive from around 70 cents per GB.

Both brands are very fast and have very high MTBF and repeated Read/Write cycle ratings.

BTW - my personal Mac Pro systems (4,1 and 2,1) have 4 Seagate Constellation ES.2 and ES.3 drives striped and they're bloody fast. My rMBP just got a new striped array of 4, 512 Samsung EVO drives via Thunderbolt. 812MB/sec W/R - Zoom!

 

[Will Keir]

What about double the R/W speeds using two drives instead of one?

No need for SSD RAID-0 here. You really won't gain anything.

 

[Will Keir]

Thanks for clearing that up. :cheers2:

I would avoid any SSDs that use a SandForce chipsets (not Sandy Bridge, that's an Intel CPU architecture).

 

[Will Keir]

I use a Caldigit HDONE with RAID 5 for my projects. I create one folder including media, edit saves, color work etc... I was putting the render files in the same location, seemed like a good idea for mobility and working with others. How do you setup your projects?

I use external RAID-5 / RAID-6 setups for larger storage, but the RAID-0 as primary workspace within the Mac tower just can't be beat and it's super cheap. If you're running such an array in your Mac, make sure you don't allow the system to put HDD's to sleep. The drives can sleep if your system does, but not on your own. You'll find that becomes a real hassle at times if it puts them to sleep, then they all have to spin-up and sync. ugh.

 

[Will Keir]

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 still don't get why you want a Raid 0 SSD array for your MacPro. A single 256GB Samsung 840 as a boot drive will give you plenty of performance for the price. Trying to put two 512GB or 960GB SSDs together in a Raid 0 stripe seems like complete overkill.

 

[Will Keir]

There is a danger in having too much space on my computer. I will tend to use it first, skipping the necessary steps for backing up to external drives.

If I plugin to an external RAID 5 every time I work, it is my backup. No need to use the internal space. Then copy the RAID 5 when it's time with another.

simply stripping (4) 2TB Drives as an internal Raid 0 will give you great performance and 8TB of local storage. I use this setup in all 3 of my Mac Pros.

 

[Will Keir]

Yeah, I looked into that. Can't give up that PCIe slot.

Thanks Jeff.

There's always the Fusion I/O PCIe SSDs to consider as well. These give the best performance. They're not really much faster than what's out there in SATA form, but they have amazingly solid sustained read and write performance. The down-side is cost and that they take up a precious PCIe slot.