need help w/ RAID setup

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goosemang
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p.1 #1 · need help w/ RAID setup

i am not sure if i need raid 0 or raid 1, and i need hardware recommendations. here's the situation:

raid 1 would be nice, but it's not 100% essential. i'm not doing commercial work that i would absolutely die if i lost. i'd be fine with backing up everything weekly or something.

that said, am i better going raid 0 for performance? i have to connect via either firewire 800 or usb 2.0. i would be storing my images on this drive and editing them with lightroom/photoshop. if i go raid 0, and get something like a 4tb raid 0 drive, would it be best to just bring in another external and do a weekly backup and then take that external off site for storage?

if raid 0 wouldn't be that beneficial, i could go with raid 1. that'd give me an instant mirror which would be nice (but not 100% essential). i'd still have to find a way to back it all up off-site though, so i'd be in a similar position as with raid 0 in that respect, only i'd have a higher startup cost for the hardware and my performance would be slower (right?)

any thoughts? hardware recommendations would be good as well. (running an imac i3 with usb 2.0/firewire 800)

thanks all

Aug 13, 2012 at 07:50 PM

acoll123
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p.1 #2 · need help w/ RAID setup

I use raid 0 on a 4TB G-Drive connected by FW800 to my Macbook Pro. Previously, I had a single 1 GB drive attached with USB2.0. The raid 0 Drive is much faster than the single drive attached via USB2 and much much faster than the gigabit connection to a NAS drive. I back up once a month or so with a drive I take back forth to my office. I edit in Aperture on my Mac. Doesn't exactly answer your question but might be peripheral.

Aug 13, 2012 at 08:03 PM

goosemang
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p.1 #3 · need help w/ RAID setup

it's good to know the raid 0 makes a difference in performance.

with it setup this way, do you use time machine to automatically back everything up to that off site external?

Aug 13, 2012 at 08:13 PM

goosemang
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p.1 #4 · need help w/ RAID setup

hmm, i think this is how i'm gonna play it. that way i get the performance benefit of raid 0, and at this time i won't have to buy an additional backup drive as i can use my current one. then when my backup gets too small in a year or so i can just get a new one, which will be cheaper then anyways.

i already do the "backup every couple of weeks and keep it at work" thing, so i'll continue that. don't really need the redundancy of raid 1 at this time. i can assume a bit of risk

Aug 13, 2012 at 08:36 PM

Hammy
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p.1 #5 · need help w/ RAID setup

As you know, RAID-0 is not RAID at all. It's just a stripe, so if one drive hiccups, all is gone.

How that affects you is up to your backup strategies and/or workflow (how much you get done between backups.) I'll agree if you need the speed and are ok loosing up to a week's worth of work, then RAID0 may be for you. But if it goes down, it's not only a week of work gone, but another chunk of time...getting a new drive, swapping out the bad drive, setting up the array again, copying the OLD data back to start again.

Does RAID0 make a difference - sure, up to twice as fast as a single drive. But if you are looking for speed, and are only casually working on a weeks worth of images, why not invest in SSD? Not the space, but alot more speed.

For me, I run RAID10 on most things for speed, because I also get the redundancy. And when a drive goes bad, I ... do nothing. The array is still up with all the speed I had before I lost a drive. Then, when I get around to it, I swap out the bad drive. I had one box with 6 drives in RAID10, lost 3 drives and still had access to all the data. (the box was destined for retirement, all data was backed up, so I just hadn't gotten around to it decommissioning it or realizing drives were dropping)

Something to think about.

Aug 13, 2012 at 08:45 PM

rchb
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p.1 #6 · need help w/ RAID setup

I have mixed emotions about Raid 0 vs 1. Yes, you do get the speed advantage by striping across multiple drives (1) however you also reduce the MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) by the number of drives. There is also a lot of ambiguity in published failure definitions. Just some food for thought!
R

Aug 13, 2012 at 09:00 PM

rchb
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p.1 #7 · need help w/ RAID setup

Oops! Meant (0)

Aug 13, 2012 at 09:01 PM

goosemang
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p.1 #8 · need help w/ RAID setup

I guess the question is how much will raid 0 actually benefit me as far as performance is concerned

Aug 13, 2012 at 09:59 PM

Hammy
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p.1 #9 · need help w/ RAID setup

If using older drive, gain is varied... from none to nearly double, depending on what you're doing. Don't look at the red bar, rather compare SATA 1x1 (internal) vs FW800 2x1:
http://barefeats.com/hard51.html

Using newer drives shows that FW800 will be your bottleneck - reducing throughput to about half of what an internally mounted (single) drive would get you:
http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-OWCDualMini-performance-MacPro-FW800.html
Showing e-Sata is the only way to obtain the throughput advantage.
Otherwise, note the last graph... single SSD leads them all.

Aug 13, 2012 at 10:30 PM

goosemang
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p.1 #10 · need help w/ RAID setup

so does that mean I'm going to be sucking wind no matter what I do? if that's the case I'd might as well go for raid 1, right? since thered be no performance gain anyways?

would I be better off organizing my Lightroom library so, for instance, the most recent stuff is on my internal and older stuff is on the external? that way the stuff I'd be most likely to work on would be on the faster internal drive?

really glad I bought a Mac. :roll:

Aug 13, 2012 at 11:55 PM

farski
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p.1 #11 · need help w/ RAID setup

What is the actual problem you're trying to solve? Unless I'm missing it, you're just comparing raid 0 vs raid 1, but it's tough to make a recommendation when we don't know what the current deficiency is.

Aug 13, 2012 at 11:58 PM

goosemang
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p.1 #12 · need help w/ RAID setup

currently i've got so much stuff on my hard drive it's bogging down my performance.

with my current setup i just back up the entire drive with time machine every couple of weeks and store the backup drive off site.

now that i'm outgrowing the internal hard drive i figure i have to move everything to some type of external... but it sounds like i'm going to take a performance hit doing this no matter what?

really i'm pretty confused about the best way to proceed. it seems all options have their benefits and sacrifices but i have no idea what the best way to proceed is.

Aug 14, 2012 at 12:05 AM

dsjtecserv
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p.1 #13 · need help w/ RAID setup

Of course, the other difference between RAID 0 and 1, which I haven't seen mentioned, is the the difference in total storage capacity: assuming matched drives in both cases, RAID 1 will have about half the capacity of RAID 0, which is "paid for" by having redundancy.

I have come down on the side of the larger total storage and (theoretically) better performance by using an internal RAID 0 array and backing up every night to an external Windows Home Server array of the same capacity. Thus I'm not using the potential redundancy of either the internal RAID or the Home Server, but I do have a backup of my working storage.

Dave

Aug 14, 2012 at 02:26 PM

JustinR
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p.1 #14 · need help w/ RAID setup

Hammy wrote:
If using older drive, gain is varied... from none to nearly double, depending on what you're doing. Don't look at the red bar, rather compare SATA 1x1 (internal) vs FW800 2x1:
http://barefeats.com/hard51.html

Using newer drives shows that FW800 will be your bottleneck - reducing throughput to about half of what an internally mounted (single) drive would get you:
http://macperformanceguide.com/Reviews-OWCDualMini-performance-MacPro-FW800.html
Showing e-Sata is the only way to obtain the throughput advantage.
Otherwise, note the last graph... single SSD leads them all.

Yep, what he said. Until very recently, external connections were always the bottleneck in performance of external drives. You won't gain anything by going RAID0 with a FW800 connection, USB2.0 will be even slower. With USB3.0, ESATA, or Thunderbolt you might be able to see some increase, but short of that, just get a really big single drive and plug it in via FW800. Keep the stuff that is really critical for speed on the internal drive. Get a RAID1 system if it helps you sleep at night.

Aug 14, 2012 at 02:53 PM

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