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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

SSD Raid? Who is using it or am I better off with RAID mechanical drives.

Samir Patel

Samir Patel

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So I finally built a new computer after many years and now on to figuring out a decent workflow. I've never used a RAID before and this was actually the first time using SSD drives as well. Just looking to finely tune my workflow. While I am not cutting feature length films I would like to have something tuned so that I don't get pissed waiting for renders etc on my own projects. Would like to take my time to get quality parts.

So here is what I have so far:

4790K with 32GB DDR3.
GTX 780 SC with 6GB memory.
Waiting for my radiator to be delivered tomorrow for liquid cooling.
Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD boot drive.
Ordered a 500GB Velociraptor (intended to use as a Scratch disk due to frequent read/write)

Beyond that I have a bunch of old drives plugged in which I believe are only 5400RPM or 7200RPM and max 3Gbps so these will all need to go after I settle on which drives to go with, just been using this so far to figure out how to go forward with workflow.


So I was thinking from here I need to have a drive solely for outputting Renders - thinking of making this an SSD.

And then maybe a large drive for storage internally. Maybe could be a large 7200RPM WD Black.

And for main editing drive containing project files and video sources either a 1TB Velocirator, 2TB WD Black or start experimenting with RAID. Would RAID on SSDs be useful? I'm not editing 24 hours a day full time so maybe SSD Raid isn't going to lead to drive failure but I wonder if it would give me much benefits. Thinking of RAID 0 for now. If I find myself editing more I may buy more drives to rearrange as a RAID 10.


And finally would I be better off using an SSD as a scratch drive and the 500GB Velociraptor as my output Render Drive instead? Using primarily Adobe CS6 for editing.

Any thoughts? Thanks.
 
depends on the size of the files you work with...some people shoot 2tb of r3d files a day....for projects like that SSD is cost prohibitive...for small projects it may work... but you'd need a raid to get any decent capacity at all

spinning drives are fine, with enough of them working together in a Raid 5 you get safety and speed
 
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I would use x2 velociraptor drives in a Raid0 as your scratch drive, I tested out using a Samsung 840 Pro 256 as a scratch drive but it had already lost a few % of durability after just a couple days, so I went back to 15k rpm SAS scratch drives. Unfortunately my SLC SSD Warp drive is only usable with my Windows system, since 3ware/LSI discontinued all Mac support past SL and Lion. Atto and Areca HBA controllers work well with both Mac/Win OS systems, particularly multi-boot systems.

To answer your question, MLC/TLC SSD are great in read only situations, but for intense write/read workloads spinning media or SLC SSD is still better in the long run, especially with an HBA controller and with media that has the lowest latency possible, such as enterprise class drives.
 
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Thanks guys. Looks like I'll keep the Velociraptor as the scratch drive. Will add a second eventually and make it a raid for the scratch drive.

Brian which mechanical drives would you suggest for the general storage and editing off of drives?
 
Last I read up on it, SSDs were non-ideal for RAIDs do to the larger amount of writes and re-writes that RAIDs go through. SSDs wear out after a certain amount of re-writes. The RAID protocols are written to take advantage of HDDs, and they sort of eat up SSDs too fast.

In other words, the reason every RAID out there that you can purchase from a manufacturer, at least as far as I've seen, is filled with HDDs, is due more to function and longevity than cost. I think.

I doubt this will be the case forever. But for now, there it is.
 
SSD MLC endurance is rated in permanent erase write cycles and not re-writes. The firmware on the drives are set to avoid the permanent erase write cycles as much as possible by different methods. Raid instructions ie controller instructions to the drives are not optimized specifically for mechanical or SSD drives. They can have different performance levels based on cache and caching models at the controller versus the amount of cache on the drives. The Controllers on the drives themselves can have different performance with raid controllers that will effect the performance of that specific model SSD drive. That however is specific to the controller firmware on that drive ie EVO drives are poor in Raid but Crucial M550 drives perform ideally. Raid itself doesnt lower the endurance on the SSD drives. The drives firmware still goes through their processes to avoid using the permanent erase write cycles. The parity raids though add parity data for all data written to the drive. That is how the redundancy is in play to protect the volume if a drive fails. That parity data equates to more data written to the drive for the amount of data sent there. So in essence it does add more data for the amount sent to the drive but it really doesnt lower the lifetime of the drive by that much. The greater the number of drives in a parity raid the lower the amount of data used for parity in the volume. Raid 0 does not have any parity or extra data so it doesnt change the lifespan or endurance of the SSD drive at all. SSD drives have a lower failure rate than mechanical drives and far less chance of errors. So their reliability is often far better in raid 0. What really decides the lifespan of the SSD drive is the firmware optimizations that are used to avoid the permanent erase write cycles. Each manufacturer here is different in how that firmware is implemented. To give you an example, the Crucial M550 drives have a rated endurance of 75TB total before the MLC can start to fail. However the testing so far show those drives exceeding that and still not showing MLC failure. So this is where the drives used for SSD raids really decide the overall lifespan and reliability over time. I have several clients who use SSD raids and they are far cheaper for high bandwidth workloads than large mechanical arrays. As of yet none of the drives have failured due to MLC endurance. This philosophy about SSD drives and lifespan has not kept up with the current firmware and MLC of SSD drives in the market. Volume size and the costs of the SSD raid versus the equivalent mechanical array required for the bandwidth needed really is the deciding factor now. Endurance is not. BTW the average rated reliability period for mechanical drives is 3 to 5 years. Current SSD drives are right in line with that writing 20GB a day to the drive for that time period.
 
Paul Russell said:
RAID 6 is definitely the most secure way to go. Backing up volume sizes that large is very time consuming so a built in level of safety is the best.
Click to expand...

Isn't Raid 10 safer as your aren't at risk of UREs stopping the rebuild if a drive fails?
 
Scott Pultz said:
Isn't Raid 10 safer as your aren't at risk of UREs stopping the rebuild if a drive fails?
Click to expand...
Raid 10 is not safer, it gives you better performance at the expense of drive space. It might be possible to suffer more drive failures before your raid is unrecoverable, but if a specific combination of two drives fail, your data is toast.
 
Thanks everyone for chiming in. I have a question regarding the SSDs. Say if I mostly just load 500GB worth of footage on a drive once and just read off of that drive all the time without replacing the footage but maybe once a month. Would that still have detrimental effects on a SSD? Thinking that with drives having a 5 year warranty maybe I am just better off buying a large 500GB or 1TB drive as a source footage drive for reading off of mostly without making continuous writes to.
 
If your SSD isn't in an array and isn't getting written to frequently, it will lose its value before it stops working. Even a 1TB SSD will seem tiny in 2018. Taking good care of your equipment makes sense, but it's there to use, not collect dust.

If power, portability, and vibration aren't an issue, use spinning drives in RAID 6. If they are, use SSD and make backups as necessary.
 
Samir, check out this drive before you choose mechanical over SSD. It comes in sizes from 128 GB up to 1 TB.

What I think makes this drive a cut above is that it uses RAIN technology... that is, Redundant Array of Independent NAND.

More or less an onboard RAID 0.
 
Samsung's EVO now comes in flavors up to 1TB. I just stuffed 4 of them in the new Promise Pegasus2 M4 (not R4 - this only holds 2.5" disks and ships with 4 toshiba laptop drives). Even in RAID6 it pulls 800MB/s Write, 1130MB/s Read. Not the cheapest solution but for around $2500 it's 3TB (or 4 in RAID0) of stupid fast scratch space. I use it for current projects and for working on the road (it "slows" to 670MB Write 780MB Read on my Thunderbolt 1 rMBP2012) and have it sitting next to a Pegasus R6 (soon to be updated to an R8 24TB) which holds older projects / near-online (the R6 is going to go home and be my offline / off-site backup via rsync).

In short, I wouldn't worry the least bit about wearing out SSDs. They're cheap now and getting cheaper, so what if a $350-400 drive only lasts 2.5-3 years...
 
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