RAID info needed!

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Shooshie
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by Shooshie »

I'm not Mike, but I have a few opinions about this, after almost 30 years of buying hard drives. Currently, my internal SATA drives consist of 4 Hitachi Deskstar drives, ranging from 2 to 4 TB, plus one WD Velociraptor Drive, 1TB. Of these, the Velociraptor is the oldest. It has been my experience that the consumer drives by WD go out rapidly. I never put those drives in active daily use. The Hitachis have run like professionals, something that IBM never got out of the Deskstars when they owned the name.

Velociraptor drives were just 15,000 rpm Enterprise drives by WD that were elevated to a consumer line. They seem to be better built to last longer and endure the rigors of sample playback — which really stresses a drive. If you go the route of WD, by all means go enterprise. I think their consumer drives are just not able to keep pace with music applications, unless you want to replace them about every 18 months. (by the way, I always keep a drive or two handy to throw in and replace an ailing drive as soon as I hear or notice any strange behavior or sounds.)

The "My Book" lines by WD were external drives which you could get in Firewire and/or USB. Those drives have been the worst performing drives in my lineup, but I kept buying them because for a while it was hard to find good Firewire externals. I have a stack of dead "My Book" drives in a file cabinet drawer. About 6, actually. And none of them made it past 2 years, with the average failure rate being about 1.8 years. They seem like a good idea, but... well... experience tells the tale.

However, I've recently invested in 5 WD My Passport Studio drives. They come in 1TB and 2TB sizes, and 4 of mine are 2TB. They are bus powered Firewire. No wall-warts, no power cords. Just a chain of 4 drives that seem to be working reliably that way. The fifth is a spare at this point, sitting on my desk awaiting that day of an emergency. I only use the externals for 2nd backups and for archival and semi-archival storage. Stuff I don't access every day. The SATA drives are for active use, and the 3 and 4TB Hitachis are super fast, despite being only 7200 rpm or less.

Overall, I have had less luck with Seagate drives, but I haven't had one in a long time, except for an external Firewire 2TB, which has been occasionally balky, but so far has hung in there pretty well.

Bottom line: Hitachi and WD Enterprise for SATA.

Shooshie
|l| OS X 10.12.6 |l| DP 10.0 |l| 2.4 GHz 12-Core MacPro Mid-2012 |l| 40GB RAM |l| Mach5.3 |l| Waves 9.x |l| Altiverb |l| Ivory 2 New York Steinway |l| Wallander WIVI 2.30 Winds, Brass, Saxes |l| Garritan Aria |l| VSL 5.3.1 and VSL Pro 2.3.1 |l| Yamaha WX-5 MIDI Wind Controller |l| Roland FC-300 |l|
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by mikehalloran »

I've not had very many WD drives fail in the last seven years... Two and both were early Green drives.

I've not had a failure with a Blue or Black. Still, if committed to spinners in a pro environment, I'd use Black or Enterprise.

I've never had a failure with a Hitachi/IBM DeskStar either.

My vitriol is reserved for Seagate where I see a failure rate of 100% within 18 months on drives with 5 year guarantees. I stopped sending them for warranty as the replacements were often crap from day one. Never again.
Last edited by mikehalloran on Thu Oct 16, 2014 6:08 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by sayatnova »

Mike & Shooshie,

This has helped a lot. Very useful and helpful info for not just myself, but others here, as well.

Thanks to everyone for their help!

I really value this place.

~Shea
http://www.bfdmusic.com
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by Shooshie »

mikehalloran wrote:My vitriol is reserved for Seagate where I see a failure rate of 100% within 18 months on drives with 5 year guarantees. I stopped sending them for warranty as the replacements were often crap from day one. Never again.
Agree about Seagate. That's why I don't have them anymore. Just the one external, bought in a weak moment when nothing else was available. It scares me sometimes, but I keep it backed up.

I used to have a WD MyBook drive which I kept backed up with another identical drive. This resulted in the most amazing drive failure I ever had. The drive and its backup both failed within 3 days of each other. The backup drive failed first, but before I could replace it, the drive it backed up failed. That was my only major data-loss in probably 25 years. (fortunately, none of it was music) Those things were very poorly made. The MyPassport drives, so far, seem to be MUCH better. As I said earlier, I only use them for low-risk applications such as 2nd backups and archives. I really do like them so far. (about 2.5 years at this point)

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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by frankf »

I used Seagate Barracuda drives without abnormal failures for 5 years. Still using one for my DP project drive. Samples are mostly moved to SSD these days with spinners relegated for archive and clones
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by Shooshie »

I was looking around on Amazon for about a 48 GB Flash Drive to send some files to a friend, and I came across some interesting things. First, a PNY 128GB Flash Drive for under $50. Wow... I remember holding a 4GB Flash Drive and wondering if they'd ever get up to, say, 64 GB. Of course, it occurred to me that we'd be seeing tiny 1TB storage units, but I figured it would be a long time out, and probably long after USB had gone the way of SCSI, NuBus, or Appletalk. Of course, that was probably 6 or 8 years ago.
    • Image
Then I came across this eye-popper. A 1TB Kingston Flash Drive. The catch? It's nearly $900.
    • Image
I've seen videos where people claim they can actually edit video on these, then send them to someone else, who can pick up editing without copying it to another drive. Now we're getting somewhere!

So, here I sit, like the day I was looking at a 4GB PNY drive wondering whether we'd ever see a 64GB drive like that, except that now I'm wondering if we'll ever see 2TB Flash Drives at $45 or less. If so, how long until we see a Thunderbolt enclosure that holds about 12 of them, in such a configuration that stores, backs up, and automatically replaces and restores dead drives, never losing a single bit of data? Why not now?

Shooshie
|l| OS X 10.12.6 |l| DP 10.0 |l| 2.4 GHz 12-Core MacPro Mid-2012 |l| 40GB RAM |l| Mach5.3 |l| Waves 9.x |l| Altiverb |l| Ivory 2 New York Steinway |l| Wallander WIVI 2.30 Winds, Brass, Saxes |l| Garritan Aria |l| VSL 5.3.1 and VSL Pro 2.3.1 |l| Yamaha WX-5 MIDI Wind Controller |l| Roland FC-300 |l|
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by James Steele »

Reviving this thread here: I was given a RAID tower that has 7 drives by a friend closing down his business. He also gave me a PCIe card that goes with it, but it's an Adaptec which does not support OSX. Since it was a gift, I'm wondering if it's worth my while to spend about $250 for a Highpoint Rocket RAID 2722 to use this for video editing perhaps? RAID 5?
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by Shooshie »

James Steele wrote:Reviving this thread here: I was given a RAID tower that has 7 drives by a friend closing down his business. He also gave me a PCIe card that goes with it, but it's an Adaptec which does not support OSX. Since it was a gift, I'm wondering if it's worth my while to spend about $250 for a Highpoint Rocket RAID 2722 to use this for video editing perhaps? RAID 5?
Maybe someone would trade with you.
|l| OS X 10.12.6 |l| DP 10.0 |l| 2.4 GHz 12-Core MacPro Mid-2012 |l| 40GB RAM |l| Mach5.3 |l| Waves 9.x |l| Altiverb |l| Ivory 2 New York Steinway |l| Wallander WIVI 2.30 Winds, Brass, Saxes |l| Garritan Aria |l| VSL 5.3.1 and VSL Pro 2.3.1 |l| Yamaha WX-5 MIDI Wind Controller |l| Roland FC-300 |l|
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by mikehalloran »

What connections are available on the tower?
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by James Steele »

I don't know what they're called and can't post a pic right now. All I know is there are two connectors to the raid tower and some thick cables that then connect to the connectors on the Adaptec card which are the same type of connectors on the Highpoint card I'm considering getting.

Like I said, it was given to me. If I don't want to use as a RAID, I could just cannibalize it for the 7 1TB drives inside and get one of those external drive docks.
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by mikehalloran »

I'm betting that what you have is SAS (Serial Access SCSI). If so, a controller under $300 is a bargain.

Fortunately, the drives should be SATA but that is not a given. Easily determined by looking at the connector on the raw drive.
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by James Steele »

I was out of town and had limited net access/capabilities. This is the card that came with it.

http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/support/ra ... /sas-3085/

Unfortunately, there are no OSX drivers, but I wrote to the people who sold the setup to my friend who gave it to me and they told me the Highpoint 2722 would work. This isn't the place I found it for less than $250 BTW:

http://www.amazon.com/HighPoint-RocketR ... B003XU36NW

It has Mini-SAS ports. Anyway, I guess my main question was considering this was given to me, is it worth the outlay of $250 to make it work with my MacPro. I have read it's really not needed for audio work, but if I do some FCPX video editing here and there (not 4K, but 1080p), is it a "might as well" sort of thing?
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RAID info needed!

Post by James Steele »

Hey Mike... sorry to bug you, but I respect your opinion. If you were in my position, and you had everything you needed for a 7 disc RAID with conventional spinning 1TB drives, but just needed a card and could get one for about $250, would you do it? Or is a RAID something most people don't need? Should I cannibalize this thing for the raw drivers and repurpose them?
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by mikehalloran »

The SAS cards I have looked at support several flavors of RAID plus JBOD. If the firmware on the tower does the same, I would go for it. This gives you a lot of flexibility since you don't have to run all 7 drives as one RAID array unless you want to.

You could consolidate other externals you may be running (if any) into that one unit or free up internal drive bays. There are a great many ways to configure your system between internal drives and this SAS external.

Assuming that the tower supports the same protocols as the controllers, you could have a drive or two dedicated to your libraries while breaking the SATA 2 bottleneck on your internal bus. This leaves 5 drives for a RAID array.

I would have a 3T or 4T 'green' drive in one of the internal bays as a Time Machine drive since speed is not an issue. Likewise, as fast as SAS is once it gets moving, you still want your system on an internal SSD or blade.
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Re: RAID info needed!

Post by James Steele »

Thanks Mike. Soon as I get the money, l'll buy the card and dive in. At the very least it will be a learning experience. :) Might be cool to see if I can offload my sample library onto a pair of discs and see if they load faster.
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