Raid 0 or 10

Here's the drives:

4 - 300 gig SAS 15000 RPM hard drives

We are trying to decide between the following configurations

Config 1:

Use one drive as boot

Use remaining three in a striped Raid 0 (fully realizing that we lose the redundancy)

Config 2:

all 4 drives mirrored on a Raid 10

I have my own list of pros and cons but would like to see what everyone here thinks.

In case it helps, the system is running on XP Pro with Dual Quad Core 3.0 ghz processors.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Well it depends on what you want to use it for. For uncompressed HD work, the magic number is 183MB/s. RAID 10 will require slightly more CPU power to run than RAID 0.

If it's your only array, I would partition it so that you have a RAID 0 volume to use as capture/playback, and a RAID 1+0 to backup as redundancy.

There's a thread in Unrequited Gear Lust regarding this. Do a search.

Add another 1TB SATA drive for a boot drive. (boot drives don't need the extra speed expensive SAS drives give you.)

Use the four SAS drives as an array (hopefully, supported by a RAID card).

The question of which RAID config (four drives as RAID 0 1.2TB volume or four drives as RAID 10 600GB volume) depends on how much space you need and how much time you have to reconstruct your editing work if the RAID 0 config goes bad while editing.

You could configure the four SAS drives as RAID 5.

-throughput should still be pretty high

-if a drive dies, the array still works (with degraded performance), and your array can be reconstructed using the checksum info on the other three drives. (I don't know how much space the checksum info takes up; but, I would guess, the array would be over 1TB.)

Take Care,

ChrisS

Thanks for the info guys.

The machine will be used strictly for video editing and web development.

I think we are going to stick with the RAID 10, which give us some redundancy but still will have the performance we are looking for. Not too concern with space. Plenty of external space available.

I did do a search and found quite a bit about the RAID 0 but very little about RAID 10.

Thanks again for the help.

Just thought I would let you guys know what I ended up doing.

Went with a single drive as the boot drive and then a RAID 0 on the remaining three drives.

Current configuration

windows xp64

Dual Quad Core 3.0ghz processors

8 gig ram

single 300gig hard drive (boot drive)

3 300 gig SAS 15000 RPM hard drives on a RAID 0

Quadro FX 5600 1.5 gb graphics card

Running Adobe Master Collection.

Compared to our older system I ran a test to see how much faster this one is.

The old system took about three minutes to render a 1 minute segment

This one took 20 seconds

Just wondering what you were rendering.

DV or HDV and were you just rendering the timeline or encoding out a file?

Just wondering what you were rendering.

DV or HDV and were you just rendering the timeline or encoding out a file?

Hey Wagsy,

HDV and timeline

Working on a project now, so when I finish it, I will let you know how that goes.

Any suggestions on settings that may help even more. I have made quite a few changes, like the normal turning off automatic updates, etc.

Nothing else is running on this machine, so I can do anything I need to without being concerned about how it will affect other programs.