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PowerMac Storage Advice PLEH

BakedBeans

BakedBeans

macrumors 68040
Original poster
May 6, 2004
3,054
0
What's Your Favorite Posish
Hi Fella's (and Fellette's ;) )

I've just bought a DUAL-CORE 2.3 G5 PowerMac and am looking at storage options.

Thats right - that means talk about RAID and Tempo-X eSATA PCI-X + Jive G5 Cages. I'm not to well informed about RAID really but will probably use 5 drives internally. I am a photo retoucher and will be using this machine to deal with a lot of images, large images in some cases. What set-up would you recommend? RAID 0? (please, whats the benefits etc). It might be best for me to have OS and apps on a raptor 10k drive for speed? also, backup will be important for me. (maybe 3 drives in RAID 0 and 2x250? in normal set up) or maybe 1xraptor 10k rpm with 4x250 in RAID 0+1??

Lastly, which tempo-x card do i need to work with the powermac... do they make things faster?

meh... storage isnt my strong point.

thanks for your PLEH in advance.

PS - i am completely open to scrapping al the above junk and doing something else :)
 
RAID 0 offers nothing, other than fanboys thinking it makes their machines faster. If you are serious about speed and redundancy you might want to go with maybe 2 Raptors in RAID 1 for your system drive, and then 3 larger drives in RAID 5 for your important data. It really depends on your needs.

As for recommending a SATA RAID card I've got no idea I only work with SCSI RAID. Also RAID is about redundancy NOT speed. So while you may think you will get a speed increase by using a RAID array this usually isn't the case at all, you have the benefit if 1 drive dies you can replace it and the array will recreate itself. As I said originally RAID 0 has been proven many times to offer no real speed increases at all, but it does give you twice the opportunity of having a drive fail and you losing your data.
 
If you have a dual-core with PCIe slots, the PCI-X ATA card is not going to do it for you.

Firmtek just announced a PCIe SATA card

As far as RAID goes, I'm with Risc on this. Don't bother, if speed is what you are after. For redundancy, remember a RAID 1 - 5 rig gives you immediate mirroring -- which is good against sudden unexpected drive failure, but does boom-all for you if you accidentally delete or overwrite a file, or want to go back to yesterday's version. I prefer no RAID, and a solid scheduled backup at least nightly, to a big external drive or two.

Your speed increase in Photoshop will come from splitting the System, the Application, the Data and the Scratch drives all onto different physical drives.
So the b*lls-out approach would be a 10,000 Raptor drive dedicated as a Photoshop Scratch disk, a 10,000 RPM Raptor as a OSX and OS swap file disk, a 120-250 Gb 7200 RPM 16 Mb cache drive as an Application drive and a 400 Gb 7200 RPM 16 Mb cache drive as a data drive. Then external 400-500 Gb drives for your backups.
 
risc said:
RAID 0 offers nothing, other than fanboys thinking it makes their machines faster. If you are serious about speed and redundancy you might want to go with maybe 2 Raptors in RAID 1 for your system drive, and then 3 larger drives in RAID 5 for your important data. It really depends on your needs.

As for recommending a SATA RAID card I've got no idea I only work with SCSI RAID. Also RAID is about redundancy NOT speed. So while you may think you will get a speed increase by using a RAID array this usually isn't the case at all, you have the benefit if 1 drive dies you can replace it and the array will recreate itself. As I said originally RAID 0 has been proven many times to offer no real speed increases at all, but it does give you twice the opportunity of having a drive fail and you losing your data.
Click to expand...


Thanks for the info, I'm definitely not asking these questions for fanboy status with my mates :)

I just genuinely am not very knowledgeable about storage and storage solutions.

I suppose it will be easiest for me to say what I DO want it to do, instead of asking what is what and what is best.

I use photoshop heavily, and want to get the most out of the powermac - so i figure a 10k raptor would be best for the OS and apps. but i dont want to have to fiddle around with different drives all over the place etc. I DO want to make the best useage of the space and the storage though.
 
How about a 74gb 10k raptor or maybe a 150 raptor x for my OS and apps then 4 x 250gb in a mirrored raid config (raid 1 i suppose) which would give me instant backup for my data.
 
BakedBeans said:
How about a 74gb 10k raptor or maybe a 150 raptor x for my OS and apps then 4 x 250gb in a mirrored raid config (raid 1 i suppose) which would give me instant backup for my data.
Click to expand...

Do you mean 1x Raptor and 4 x 250GB in 2 x RAID 1? RAID 1 is direct mirroring you don't direct mirror on to 3 seperate drives. Why do you actually think you need RAID? As per usual CanadaRAM has given not only a detailed explanation but a great suggestion as to how to run the machine. For 4 drives as you mention here 2x RAID 1 would give you 1 set of redundant drives and I guess you could automatically back up to the 2nd set, but then you have no redundancy on the system drive. Personally I'd just do what CanadaRAM says or if I really needed the redundancy I'd set the machine up:

2 x Raptors for the System/Apps - RAID 1
3 x Large SATA II 16 MB Cache drives for my data - RAID 5

I'd also have external backup for my data.
 
I was hoping i could have the 4x250 (or whatever size) appear as one 500gb drive?

so i could have data on it and that data would be mirrored onto the drive.

CanadaRAM is awesome but that setup of drive is far to complicated for lil' ol' me.

"do you think you actually need raid"

i did explain in my post that i am not knowledgeable about this, so any info or tips you can give me is appreciated.
 
arrgh i see you went with the 2.3 dual :( just mailed you info on the quad as well

o well , hope you love your new 2.3 :cool:
 
BakedBeans said:
i did explain in my post that i am not knowledgeable about this, so any info or tips you can give me is appreciated.
Click to expand...

I've already pointed out what I consider to be the best RAID setup for you. 1 x RAID 1 system array, 1 x RAID 5 data array, with external backup.

Is there any other info you require?
 
Ok, I don't want external backup - i dont se the point of the inconvenience and expense when i will have 5 drives internally.

I think RAID 1 is, although a touch inefficient and expensive (100% space loss) a great way to backup your data on the fly ( i wont need to take this data away with me anywhere ) without having to think about it.

My question (Taxing your brain again :) ) is - can i have 4x250/500gb drives to appear as one drive (500GB/1TB respectively) drive so i can drag and drop data and have it mirror without any fuss or will i have to have 2 x 250s in one raid 1 and another 2 x 250 in a raid 1?

basically do they have to be paired in twos or can you have lots of drives acting as one?

Also - i don't really get RAID 5, from what i havce just read about it it doesnt seem as good as raid one for data

http://www.acnc.com/04_01_05.html

thanks for your help so far.
 
If you are certain you want 4 drives what you need to do is set up 2 RAID 1 arrays. On more advanced RAID controllers you can set these to automatically mirror each other, but I doubt you'll get that functionality from a SATA RAID controller. Once you have the 2 RAID 1s set up you will need to set up software to automatically backup to the 2nd of these RAID 1 arrays.

The reason I keep bringing up the RAID 1 + RAID 5 scenario is basically if you are going to take the time to make sure your data is redundant, why wouldn't you be doing the same with your OS and apps?

RAID 5 is about data redundancy. In a RAID 5 array you have 3 (or more drives) looking after the data, the more drives the more opportunities when things go wrong for your data to be safe. When you say "basically do they have to be paired in twos or can you have lots of drives acting as one?" above that is RAID 5. RAID 1 is just mirroring of 1 drive on to another. You must not confuse redundancy with backups, CanadaRAM explains this very well above.
 
risc said:
If you are certain you want 4 drives what you need to do is set up 2 RAID 1 arrays. On more advanced RAID controllers you can set these to automatically mirror each other, but I doubt you'll get that functionality from a SATA RAID controller. Once you have the 2 RAID 1s set up you will need to set up software to automatically backup to the 2nd of these RAID 1 arrays.

The reason I keep bringing up the RAID 1 + RAID 5 scenario is basically if you are going to take the time to make sure your data is redundant, why wouldn't you be doing the same with your OS and apps?
Click to expand...

Thanks so much for your input on this one. it has really helped my decision making process.

thankss

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo_sata_e4i.html

^^ is that the one for mine - it is isnt it.
 
PLEH is an acronym I've never seen before and a quick google turned up nothing definitive. What the heck does it stand for and where did it come from?
 
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