Adobe Community: All disks on Areca RAID card?

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1. Harm Millaard,

Aug 1, 2012 12:38 AM in reply to Dan Clark

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Depends on the number of SATA3 connections you have. A number of motherboards have only two SATA3 connections on the mobo, plus two SATA3 connections on the Marvell chip. In that case I would leave the SSD on a mobo SATA3 port, the two Velociraptors on the Marvell SATA3 ports and the rest on the Areca. If you have 4 SATA3 ports on the mobo, you can consider to have the Velo's on the ICHR ports. The WD Blue can remain connected to any SATA port.

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2. Dan Clark,

Aug 1, 2012 7:14 AM in reply to Harm Millaard

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Harm,

Again, thanks for the great feedback.

My P6X58D MOBO has only two Sata3, 6GB/s ports (on the Marvell controller) and six Sata2, 3GB/s ports on the Intel "ICHR10R" Southbridge controller. I'd love to replace the MOBO, CPU, memory, etc. now. Since I build all of my computers, that's a lot of work and I can't spare the time now. So using the current system is a constraint.

Based on your recommendations, it looks like the config should be:

- SSD on Sata3 port.

- RAID 0 Velociraptors on Areca controller using SAS to SATA cable.

- RAID 5 Seagates on Areca controller using SAS to SAS cable.

- WD Blue on Sata 2 port.

This look OK? Any recommended changes?

Many thanks,

Dan.

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3. Harm Millaard,

Aug 1, 2012 8:13 AM in reply to Dan Clark

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Looks great.

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4. Dan Clark,

Aug 1, 2012 8:43 AM in reply to Harm Millaard

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Excellent! Thank you sir.

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5. RjL190365,

Aug 1, 2012 9:12 AM in reply to Harm Millaard

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Harm Millaard wrote:

Depends on the number of SATA3 connections you have. A number of motherboards have only two SATA3 connections on the mobo, plus two SATA3 connections on the Marvell chip. In that case I would leave the SSD on a mobo SATA3 port, the two Velociraptors on the Marvell SATA3 ports and the rest on the Areca. If you have 4 SATA3 ports on the mobo, you can consider to have the Velo's on the ICHR ports. The WD Blue can remain connected to any SATA port.

And not all Marvell SATA 3 controllers support RAID at all. For example, the Marvell SATA 3 controller on the Asus P8P67 Pro motherboard that's currently in my main system has no RAID support whatsoever. Only the native Intel SATA controller(s) on that motherboard support RAID at all.

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6. Dan Clark,

Aug 1, 2012 9:28 AM in reply to RjL190365

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RJK,

Hi. Yes, you're correct. That's why I'm only using the Marvell for the SSD. The SSD will be used for the OS and apps only. User data, media, paging file, etc will be on other disks.

Thanks,

Dan.

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7. Martin Douglas,

Aug 1, 2012 2:51 PM in reply to Harm Millaard

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Do you think that a single 600gb WD Velocirapter would be fast enough for paging file and media cache. This would be in conjuction with a 8 drive media raid

Thanks

Martin

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8. JEShort01,

Aug 1, 2012 3:58 PM in reply to Martin Douglas

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Martin,

While a single 600gb Vraptor may be "fast enough", I suspect that by simply adding the paging and media cache onto to your 8-drive RAID would perform even better. Just do some testing to help hone your final production setup. I used PPBM5 runs to evaluate various configurations. Don't forget that different media types and project workflows do have different priorities.

Regards,

Jim

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9. Dan Clark,

Aug 1, 2012 6:28 PM in reply to JEShort01

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Gentlemen,

It isn't a 600GB Velociraptor. It's two 300GB Velociraptors in Raid 0 configuration. I.e. raid "A" on the Areca controller would be the raid 5 media array. Raid "B" on the Areca controller would be the two disk (Velociraptor) raid 0 array.

Regarding adding the two Velociraptor to the media raid, I wouldn't mind doing that except that I thought that each raid array was limited to the size of the smallest disk. Wouldn't that turn all of the 1 TB drives into 300GB drives?

Regards,

Dan.

p.s. It should be obvious that I'm not a raid expert. That's why I'm looking for feedback.

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10. Martin Douglas,

Aug 1, 2012 7:12 PM in reply to Dan Clark

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My apologies for the confusion, although my qestion was related to the discussion, it probably should have been a separate post.

Martin

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11. JEShort01,

Aug 2, 2012 4:29 AM in reply to Dan Clark

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Dan,

A 2 x Vraptor 300GB RAID 0 array (600GB array) would be a great supplement to a 8x Areca based RAID 5 array. I would suggest using the RAID 0 for: paging file, media cache, media cache DB, and any render outputs. That will give you lots of speed, and if you were to loose your RAID 0 (they are indeed less reliable than a RAID 5 array, you really have not lost anything at all that is not completely recoverable).

Regards,

Jim

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12. Dan Clark,

Aug 2, 2012 4:52 AM in reply to JEShort01

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Jim,

Thanks for the comments. That's pretty much my exact thinking. It's great to get feedback that I'm on the right track.

Up until a few weeks ago, I had a raid 0 set with two WD Black 2TB drives. I wanted speed plus safety, so I got a separate 2TB backup drive and setup up a backup app to regularly back up my data on the raid 0 array.

That worked well except that the backup utility started filling up the backup drive quickly and had to be pruned. Worse, the backup app failed at some point and I didn't notice it. And of course my raid 0 failed.

The only good news is that the raid 0 seemed to partially fail. I suspect that it was losing sectors. I was able to save most of my files on that disk, including most of my still images. And a couple of Pr projects and the most important clips. The bad news is that did lose some images, Pr projects, and clips. Not critical, but damned irritating nevertheless.

I learned a good lesson - never trust complex solutions completely. Raid 0 for non-critical stuff is OK. Raid 5 or better for the important files is the best option, IMO. Like Harm, I'm still wrestling with the fewer, larger disks vs more, smaller disks issue. In any case, I'm thinking about Raid 5 with a hot spare for safety (I believe that's dooable with the 1882ix.)

Regards,

Dan.

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13. JAKE JONSON,

Aug 3, 2012 11:08 AM in reply to Dan Clark

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I see you referring to this card as PCIe 3.0 but at least on this page below (if this is the one you're getting), it specifies that its 2.0 instead. Not really sure what speed difference it really would make, but it piqued my curiosity. You should still be getting close to 1000MB/sec reads from your RAID 5, right?

http://www.arecadirect.com/arpcin12.html

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14. Dan Clark,

Aug 3, 2012 7:19 PM in reply to JAKE JONSON

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Jake,

You are 100% correct - that's what the page says. However, when I wrote to Areca, they said the PCIE 3.0 versions were in stock at the vendor. When I called ArecaDirect he assured me that they had the new version and I specified that on the order. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

That said, my current MOBO only supports PCIE 2.0. I'm buying the 3.0 version to meet future needs and prolong its lifespan. I understand that 3.0 is backwards compatible with 2.0 MOBOs.

Hopefully I'll be able to get by on 1000MB/sec. :-)

Regards,

Dan.

P.s. My system SSD drive came today! :-)

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All disks on Areca RAID card?

Jul 31, 2012 10:22 PM

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