RAID0 - is it worth it?

[videoeditor246346]

Hey guys,

I was wondering if anyone here has been using a RAID0 system for a fast storage solution for media on active projects, and how good is it? I am looking into a 3x4TB RAID0 system. I will also have 12TB in backup storage and 8TB in yearly archive storage.

I initially thought of getting a 1TB Samsung 960 PRO but was told that it was overkill, considering the bandwidth required from most camera codecs I will be processing (RED/A7s/C100).

My friend recommended I get HGST NAS drives as they have low failure rates and good specs all around. They can sustain 200MB/s read speeds, so a RAID0 theoretically would be close to three times that amount. Not bad at $140 for the 4TB versions. He also mentioned that I should be able to software RAID0 with my Asrock X370 Taichi motherboard, so no need for a separate RAID controller.

My other system specs feature a Ryzen 1700x, 32GB 2933Mhz RAM, 1080Ti GPU, 250GB 960 PRO (OS), 250GB 850 EVO (Cache).

[Bill_Gehrke]

Is there a real reason why you want 12 TB of RAID 0 online?

[videoeditor246346]

For me, 12TB is a safe amount of storage for the number of active projects I will have going on at any given time. For example, one project that was shot on a Sony F65 takes up over 3TB of storage. Another which was shot on two Red cameras takes up nearly 2TB. It adds up quickly for me.

[RjL190365]

Here's the deal:

Your video projects are far longer (in total footage time) than those of the typical professional-level NLE user. Whereas most pros that use Premiere or any other NLE work on only a few minutes of footage at a time, you are one of the few who need to work on many, many hours of footage all at once. As such, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to storage: Either you get very fast, very large capacity solid state storage and pay much, much more than you would a house for it, or cheap out and get something that chokes completely on this footage no matter how many disks in that RAID 0 array.

Secondly, hard drive performance plummets severely as the disk fills up. A disk that delivers 200 MB/second sequentially on the outer tracks will plummet to less than 70 MB/second once it fills up. And the half-performance point of a hard disk comes at approximately the 60% full mark.

What's more, the performance of a RAID 0 array is limited not only by the disks, but also the RAID controller or the chipset's southbridge (or PCH). For example, the maximum sustainable write throughput of the PCH on the Z97 (Haswell) chipset (where all six of the SATA ports are connected to) is only 1.3 GB/second - total. This goes for everything combined that's connected to it, not for a single device.

As a result of all that, your work demands an astronomically expensive (priced at possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars per system), highly specialized or totally dedicated editing system. Just adding consumer hard drives and configuring them in a RAID 0 array just won't cut it at all.

Hope this helps,

Randall

[RoninEdits]

i think you are overestimating the needs for playback of the listed footage, and underestimating what raid-0 with 2 or 3 hdd's can do. we have had people previously post here that they were editing red on a single hdd, and there is even a puget article that lists a single slow 5400rpm hdd as capable of 4 streams of red. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-2015-4-Storage-Optimization-854/#Mu...

1.3 gb/s for the z97 pch is still plenty to handle multiple hdd's in raid-0. also the OP listed a ryzen x370 motherboard, so it should have even more total bandwidth available. you also suggest the OP will need a system possibly costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the ssd's alone would cost more than a house, are you on drugs or what? 

[videoeditor246346]

I have three HGST hard drives which I will be configuring into a software RAID0. Will post Crystal disk benchmarks soon...

I was looking into SSD storage but did not want to do 4TB for $1,000+

[Bill_Gehrke]

With hard disk drives CDM is not a good benchmark it will be very misleading because it does not show you the slow down as the drive fills up.  Try HDTune.  Here are Two each 2TB Hard Disk drives in software RAID 0

Of course SSD's do not have this problem also Access time here is 15 ms where access time with SSD's is Microseconds.

[RjL190365]

As Bill stated, CrystalDiskMark is useless for hard disks since that program tests only the outermost tracks of such disks (or if you specify an extremely large test size, it will give you only the average sequential read and write speed over that section size).

And what I stated earlier is a little misleading, especially the part where I suggested such an expensive dedicated system. It does not have to cost that much, but what I had previously stated assumes that one's NLE decompresses and recompresses video on the fly for editing. This, even at it's most active, does need a disk that's somewhat faster than what such decompressed footage requires. (This means that for 1080p HD video that's decompressed in such a manner, a SATA III SSD at a minimum would have been needed to edit comfortably.)

As for HD Tune, AFAIK it has been a paid program for several years now. There was a free version that has not been updated in ages, and only tested the first 1TB of any larger disks.

Randall

[Bill_Gehrke]

Randall,

I guess I had forgotten about the cost but I just saw that you can download a trial version of Pro, it may have some restrictions.  Here is a very interesting link on data rates and storage requirements that I just found.  Scroll down to the table.

[RoninEdits]

RjL190365  wrote

And what I stated earlier is a little misleading, especially the part where I suggested such an expensive dedicated system. It does not have to cost that much, but what I had previously stated assumes that one's NLE decompresses and recompresses video on the fly for editing. This, even at it's most active, does need a disk that's somewhat faster than what such decompressed footage requires. (This means that for 1080p HD video that's decompressed in such a manner, a SATA III SSD at a minimum would have been needed to edit comfortably.)

this all sounds wrong, why would an nle recompress video for/while editing?