Members amplayer Posted January 1, 2007 Members Share Posted January 1, 2007 Anyone here use RAID 0 or 1 for a sampler or soft synth PC? I'm considering using RAID 0 for a PC that is a dedicated sampler and soft synth machine. I can't find any good info on the web to see whether or not RAID is a good idea for this application. In my application, I will only be reading from these drives, not writing. I will create back-ups externally, so I don't care about increasing the reliability of the drives. What I want is to get the absolute fastest hard drive read performance possible for use with Kontakt and some soft synth applications. Are there any of you PC techno people that have an opinion or can point me to web articles for such? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members temnov Posted January 1, 2007 Members Share Posted January 1, 2007 I'm using RAID on my ADK built computer. Scott and his guys are pretty good with this. So, when I was installing RAID on my own they provided me some information: "You only have 2 drives in your system (unless you added some) With only 2 drives you do not want to raid them. You need 1) OS drive 2) Audio record to drive 3) Samples drive (if you're doing samples and I thought you said you were) Now that is minimum with samples You can make drive 2 a raid array for bigger recording ability (lots of 96k) That requires another drive You can make your samples drive a raid (best for streaming samples, not to important for memory loading samples) this would require another drive. So again If there is only a total of 3 drives you do not want to raid unless your not doing samples" Hope it was useful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members steveg Posted January 1, 2007 Members Share Posted January 1, 2007 If you only have two drives, the previous poster is correct, it is best practise to but the operating sytem on one drive and your audio files on the other. The fact that they use separate drives will give you the most immediate gain. In terms of RAID levels, if you have an OS drive and two extra drives, and/or you simply want to do RAID, here is the difference. RAID 0 stripes the volume across two drives - this gives you a speed advantage by spreading both the load of READ and WRITE data across two separate physical drives. This gives an overall performance gain and more storage space (~ the sum of the two drives). RAID 1 writes the data to both drives at the same time and gives you redundandcy- you can lose one of the drives and still have your data. You get half of the storage space available but it is redundant and you have faster read times because the file can be retrieved from whichever drive responds faster. So technically, for overall performance, RAID 0 is better. However, RAID 1 gives you protection from the hardware failure of either drive. I personally use RAID 1 in these siutations regularly. I hope this helps PS- always use a hardware RAID controller- software RAID is not good!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members amplayer Posted January 1, 2007 Author Members Share Posted January 1, 2007 My intention is to have 3 drives total: 1 for the OS, and 2 for streaming samples. As I mentioned, I don't care about the protection aspect because I back up my data. What I want is fast disk streaming. That's why I was considering RAID, and probably RAID 0. I was not considering RAID for my OS drive; I only wanted it for my samples drives. Primarily, I want to be able to get better performance from Kontakt in DFD mode (disk streaming). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members TimOBrien Posted January 1, 2007 Members Share Posted January 1, 2007 RAIDs do not give massive performance increases; only about 10-15%. They also boost the complexity (and therefore the potential for failure) of your system. Far better to dedicate a drive for OS&apps, a drive for audio recording and another drive for your samples. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Rudolf von Hagenwil Posted January 1, 2007 Members Share Posted January 1, 2007 The DAW's had RAID 2+0 with four internal drives; A week ago I didn't set the Raid up again. But compensate with drives with at least 7200 RPM and 4 GB RAM, plus streaming video and audio from different drives. Also the danger that when one drive fails in certain Raid data storage scheme, lead to this decision. . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members steveg Posted January 1, 2007 Members Share Posted January 1, 2007 Originally posted by amplayer My intention is to have 3 drives total: 1 for the OS, and 2 for streaming samples. As I mentioned, I don't care about the protection aspect because I back up my data. What I want is fast disk streaming. That's why I was considering RAID, and probably RAID 0. I was not considering RAID for my OS drive; I only wanted it for my samples drives. Primarily, I want to be able to get better performance from Kontakt in DFD mode (disk streaming). You are definitely a candidate for RAID 0 then. I would suggest you try it and see what performance you get. If it is not enough then you will likely need a faster controller and/or faster drives. RAID 0 is going to be your fastest option Good luck and please post the results! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members seclusion Posted January 1, 2007 Members Share Posted January 1, 2007 I use 2 Raid 0 systems in my DawOne HD 7200 by itself non-raid obviously, then a raid 0 array ata off a pci card with 2 7200 200 gig seagate drives. Then I have another raid 0 array with 2 300 gig sata seagate drives using the onboard controller. I find the pci raid card seems to have better performance. But that all works great on my Daw with sonar and gigastudio.Later Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members aeon Posted January 2, 2007 Members Share Posted January 2, 2007 RAID 0 in such a situation will give a boost to overall drive transfer speed, but in the case of doing sample-playback and other situations where access speed and distributed seek load is more important, using 2 drives with no RAID may actually be a better solution. That said, such wisdom was true years ago (late 90s), and given the performance of modern drives and interfaces, it may not matter much any longer either way. If this is true, then I would avoid the RAID as a matter of additional complexity which will offer little real-world benefit. Now, if you said you were doing RT NLE HD video, then I would say RAID away! cheers, Ian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members seclusion Posted January 2, 2007 Members Share Posted January 2, 2007 I hear ya, but I have to say I moved my one piano sample library TBO, a big honking piano and I wasn't able to set a good latency with my soundcard on my single sata 7200 drive glitch free. But when I used raid 0 I'm able to lower the buffers to 128 and play away! Personally for that piano itself, for when I want to just play the piano, I copied the files over to my ata 133 Raid Card, It's a PCI (Switchview 6000) and have even better glitch free'r performance then my sata array. Funny?But anyways, whenever they decide to have a solid state 200 gig drive with 0 access time, we'll always be talking latency!Later Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members amplayer Posted January 2, 2007 Author Members Share Posted January 2, 2007 Originally posted by aeon RAID 0 in such a situation will give a boost to overall drive transfer speed, but in the case of doing sample-playback and other situations where access speed and distributed seek load is more important, using 2 drives with no RAID may actually be a better solution. That said, such wisdom was true years ago (late 90s), and given the performance of modern drives and interfaces, it may not matter much any longer either way. If this is true, then I would avoid the RAID as a matter of additional complexity which will offer little real-world benefit. Now, if you said you were doing RT NLE HD video, then I would say RAID away! cheers, Ian I'd sure like to know if there is a benefit to Raid 0 for sample disk streaming, and if so, how much. According to Tascam, there is a benefit to Raid for Gigastudio: Tascam says using RAID best for Ultimate performance Still, since I primarily use Kontakt, I don't know for sure ff there is a benefit, but if there is, I don't mind the added complexity. Disc streaming creates many possible bottlenecks, but as far as I can tell, the disc read time is one of the biggest bottlenecks and therefore should be optimized. Short of actually trying it both ways, I'd sure like to find out if there is a benefit... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Dylan Walters Posted January 2, 2007 Members Share Posted January 2, 2007 Go for it! With a decent RAID controller (like the ones found on high-performance motherboards) RAID 0 absolutely smokes! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members amplayer Posted January 3, 2007 Author Members Share Posted January 3, 2007 Originally posted by Dylan Walters Go for it! With a decent RAID controller (like the ones found on high-performance motherboards) RAID 0 absolutely smokes! Thanks. I'm in the process of buying the components for this computer. Do you have any suggestions for high performance motherboards with a good RAID controller? I'm intending to use a Core 2 duo and 2 Gbytes RAM. I'll probably get a pair of 500 Gbyte drives for the samples, each SATA II with 16 Mbyte buffers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.