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440 Forums _ Hard Drives _ Raid Drive

Posted by: jfitz Sun 4 Jan 2004, 23:30

Well, I've inherited a G4 w/ a 149 GB Raid drive, and I'm going to try to put together a small recording system bit by bit. The Mac hard drive is only 17 GB. I am intending to use LOGIC 6 Gold. I will be recording live sound as well as midi.

Can I use the RAID drive to advantage, or if not can I reconfigure it as individual drives?

I am really a novice and need some advice here.

Thanks and
PAX
jfitz

Posted by: dixiechicken Mon 5 Jan 2004, 15:10

Yes and (no ).
Depends on the raid configuration.

2 first raid-levels 0 and 1, is striped or mirrored, and needs at least 2 physical drives.
raid level 3 and above needs at least 3 physical drives.
(one or more physical drives are used for the parity check bits)

For simplicitys sake I will assume your raid system consists of two physical drives.

A striped drive is faster than a single drive or mirrored drive system.
Striped means writing/reading data from/to the 2 drives at the same time.
( half of the data goes to one drive the other half onto the other drive )
Resulting in shorter read & write times.

Mirrored is just what the name implies an exact duplicate of ALL the data on both drives. Resulting in enhanced security and actually a very slight performance increase.
( in either writing or reading data - dont remeber which)

You can use your raid system in either configuration. With 2 physical drives you can also span them to a single logical drive, whith doubled space.
( two 120 Gb drives will appear as one 240Gb drive )

For simplified operation in all raid-mode levels it's important that all physical drives are of the same size and make.

Go ahead and format & experiment with your raid system before recording anything vital on it, then you'll get a feeling for the different raidmodes.
(dont format your boot-drive - that will save you lots of time )

Cheers: Dixiechicken

Posted by: deFries Sat 21 Feb 2004, 14:57

IMO configuring a RAID system to increase I/O performance is a nice thing to do.

Pretty much agree with dixie, just like to add:

While a RAID 0 (stripe or concat) will increase both read and write performance, any mirroring RAID level (1, 3, 5) will increase read perfomance, but, depending basically on the hardware I/O configuration, might decrease write performance (to write to a mirror, you obviously need to physically write data more then once), and is therefore not an option for audio recording (except for a very sofisticated setup, i.e. configuring your loops and samples - read-only when recording - on a mirror.

I don't have RAID experience with Macs, though.

Cheers,

deFries