RAID 10 vs RAID 5 for video editing, GFX work

[cb911]

I'm just a bit unsure about which way to go with the RAID I'm setting up...

I've got 4x300GB drives that I'll be setting up in RAID. I've been doing extensive research and have found that for applications that require high levels of speed in disk read/writes that RAID 5 isn't the best option. RAID 0 is always recommended for video editing, etc. And since I'd have enough drives, RAID 10 would provide that speed and redundancy.

I'm just wanting some real-world feedback from people who have experience with either RAID 5, 0 or 10. The prospect of having ~900GB available storage using RAID 5 is appealing, but I just wonder how much the disk read/write speed differs between RAID 0? Of course a RAID 10 setup would still provide 600GB storage, the extra 300GB would be handy, but not if it would severly affect HD performance.

Any comments and help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[simon-says]

I say go with a RAID 10 (0+1) setup, that is if you need the redundancy. If you were doing only or maybe 90%+ read only work I'd say go with a RAID 5 setup, as RAID 5 as the worst write performance. Depending on how much you write to the RAID you will probably be more happier with the RAID 0+1 than having the extra space with the RAID 5.

 

[cb911]

i guess i could just try both... but I've got a feeling 1+0 is going to be alot better for my needs. thanks for the advice.

Something else that just occured to me... the hard drives are SATA II and the RAID controller card is SATA II as well. supposedly this doubles the transfer rate from SATA... would this help to significanty speed up the read/write function on a RAID 5 array? Would it be comparable to using a non-RAID standard SATA drive? Just curious.

 

[plinkoman]

Make sure you don't confuse a RAID 10 (1+0) with a RAID 01 (0+1). For the most part, there is no difference, but if you mirror two stripes (0+1), if a drive fails, two drives need to be rebuilt, however, if you stripe two mirrors (1+0), only one has to. a RAID 10 also allows one drive from each array to fail and maintain integrity, whereas with a RAID 01, both drives in a single array can fail, but none from the other.

If you require performance on the drive, and still want redundancy, i definitely recommend a RAID 10 setup over a RAID 5 setup. with a RAID 5, writing a block of data requires 4 separate actions: read old data, read old parity, write new data, write new parity. The advantage of SATA II is negligible as the bottleneck(at least after the cache is used up) is the drive itself, not the connection, and in any case, all things being equal, a 10 will always be faster then a 5.

 

[cb911]

thanks for the extra info.

i had read that 10 was preferable to 01, and i'm not sure if the HighPoint RocketRAID 2220 supports 01, but it says it does support 10. but setting up that may be a whole different thread...

well RAID 10 it is!

and talking about bottlenecks... where's the biggest bottleneck in the PM G5's? is it at the hard drives (reading/writing data)? by using RAID 10 over other options I hope be giving the system enough room for throughput. of course it would help if my PM G5 had PCI-X, i've only got PCI 33MHz.

any other areas i could upgrade to improve performance on a Dual Processor 2GHz PM G5? It's only got 2GB RAM right now, I will max it out at 4GB in the future. I know this is kind of going O/T for this thread, but just thought i'd ask.

and not to be confused is the reason i'm going for a RAID setup - first and foremost I'm doing this for the redundancy aspect of RAID. but of course a performance increase is always nice, we know that RAID 0 will increase performance. I'm also just wondering how the performance of RAID 1+0 compares with a simple RAID 0?