# To Raid or not to Raid



## Craig Sharmat (Feb 12, 2014)

This may have been covered before but I want to get some opinions on my particular setup if you don't mind.

I bought a enclosure with which I placed 4 1 TB SSD drives in which will go through thunderbolt on a new Mac trash can. I am contemplating raiding them but know the dangers are if one drive goes down essentially it messes with everything. I am thinking maybe they are fast enough drives to not be raided but I don't really know....thus my post.

Thanks in advance for opinions.


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## Jack Weaver (Feb 12, 2014)

Yes, certainly they are fast enough without RAIDing them. It depends on how blazing fast you need them to be. They'll certainly be a lot faster than your present hard drives inside your current Mac Pro. 

If you want to get better performance and play the 'odds' game you could create two RAID 0's with each of them having two drives instead of one bigger 4-drive RAID. That way if there should ever be a problem you would only loose half of your data. 

I might think with your hefty schedule (and the colossal struggle it would be to get all that data back into working order) that leaving them in a JBOD configuration would be acceptable. I don't remember if your chosen external drive chassis will accommodate Thunderbolt 2. That could make a bit of a difference too. 

HTH

.


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## thedreampolice (Feb 13, 2014)

You could do a RAID 10 with 4 drivers and that would give you 2TB of usable space AND redundancy from failing.


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## wst3 (Feb 13, 2014)

there are so many variables, many of which are beyond your direct influence...

RAID is a technology from the mid 1990s developed to try to get past some very annoying bottlenecks. The biggest problems at the time were capacity and read speeds. RAID striping resolves both.

It was discovered early on that in addition to performance, RAID provided a means of increasing uptime and data reliability/availability.

You can configure a RAID array to protect your data, or increase throughput, or both. These days I'd expect that protection is probably the bigger attraction, as disk, and disk sub-system performance have improved significantly.

Thunderbolt is, for all intents, a wide open interface. It is faster than anything we can throw at it today (that will change, SCSI used to wear that mantle<G>!)

Striping really stupid-fast disks will increase throughput, and at least in theory it will reduce seek time. Thunderbolt won't get in the way, but what happens in the computer? Can the interfaces (software level) handle the load? Or, more to the point, will it make a difference?

A big part of the question is how you will use the space? Is this your sample library space, or space for projects?

In either case I would probably favor protection over performance, but it does make a difference.

If you are using these drives for samples I'd manually mirror them, probably as two sets of stripe-sets. Why manually? Well, sample libraries do not change frequently (I guess for some they do<G>). So it is enough to mirror them every time you make a change.

If it is project space then I'd use an active mirror of some kind. If space is at a premium I'd use RAID 5, if not I'd probably use RAID 1+0 again, but leave the mirror active.

The real puzzle, which I can not answer, is how this particular RAID controller manages both stripes and mirrors. Some controllers create checksum sets with almost no penalty (except of course during a rebuild), some take a real performance hit on writes. Similarly, some controllers can make writes transparent when the drives are mirrored, and even provide a benefit when reading from a mirrored pair.

It's complex, and there are no "simple" answers. Others using the same controller may be able to provide more detail if you ask the right questions<G>! That's always the catch isn't it?


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 13, 2014)

There are different kinds of RAID arrays, but I've ever been able to see much point to any of them for an audio set-up.

Seek and read time are non-issues with SSDs. They're almost zero.

The right RAID will increase throughput from the drives to the Thunderbolt bus. I believe the interface to the SSDs is still SATA, so if a few hundred stereo voices per drive is a limitation, then maybe RAID makes sense.

I personally wouldn't want the bother. Too many things to go wrong!


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 13, 2014)

You have to try both raid0 and jbod to experience whether you will appreciate the difference in performance.

4TB is a lot of data. Copying the data from a backup to the raid or jbod volume will take some time. From a single hard drive this will take a whole working day or a whole night. If you would copy from 2 drives in parallel you slash this time in two. Using 3 drives....


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## Craig Sharmat (Feb 14, 2014)

Thanks much for the advice gents....yes this is purely for sample playback. I am generally sensing not to Raid but of course have mirrored backups which of course will be on cheap drives, it is expensive already.

I will have a separate TB SSD drive for projects.


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## wst3 (Feb 14, 2014)

Well done Nick!


Nick Batzdorf @ Thu Feb 13 said:


> There are different kinds of RAID arrays, but I've ever been able to see much point to any of them for an audio set-up.



One minor qualification - it appears you are looking at performance, not availability. From a performance perspective RAID arrays have had their day in the sun. From time to time over the last 25 years or so there have been periods, especially back in the SCSI vs ATA days, when disk sub-systems just could not keep up with the demands made by music production software These periods have been brief, but if you were making your living doing music RAID was a real help.



Nick Batzdorf said:


> Seek and read time are non-issues with SSDs. They're almost zero.



Yup - we are in a period where the production software needs to catch up with storage system technology. I prefer that<G>!



Nick Batzdorf said:


> The right RAID will increase throughput from the drives to the Thunderbolt bus. I believe the interface to the SSDs is still SATA, so if a few hundred stereo voices per drive is a limitation, then maybe RAID makes sense.



That's the "system engineering" approach... and I think it is the right approach, but I can understand if others do not wish to bother.



Nick Batzdorf said:


> I personally wouldn't want the bother. Too many things to go wrong!



IF you have a back up scheme in place then I'd agree that it isn't worth the effort, but I'm not sure I'd agree that there are too many things that can go wrong. If you don't have a back up scheme in place, and you understand that making a change to a RAID mirror changes both copies (an important detail), then RAID might be for you.

I prefer an off-line mirror - I change my sample drive so infrequently that it isn't a bother at all. The downside, and there is always a downside, is that the off-line drive could fail and I'd never know!


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 14, 2014)

Yeah, the days when you had to turn off the menu bar clock to save CPU were different.

I should never say never.


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## Gusfmm (Feb 14, 2014)

Craig,

Although I'm an enthusiastic proponent of RAID 0 for our sample (and video) streaming purposes, the truth of the matter is that today, with SSD speeds, it is very difficult to empirically show the benefit of RAID in our real life applications. 

You will often see some of our colleagues on here frequently bringing up that point, and their belief there is probably no benefit. I do believe what synthetic tests show a difference, and that such a difference must be extrapolatable to our real-life music applications. It has just been tough to be able to compile the right methodology to demonstrate it. And the time and energy to do it.

Other than RAID 0 for performance, and provided you have a second (and third) external back-up for your RAID array, I do not endorse other RAID configurations, for our purposes. For our practical (non-enterprise) purposes, I'd only care about RAID 10 if you needed an on-line fully accessible redundant and efficient data source. But I think rebuilding a drive with a back-up is a more practical and simpler solution for our typical Joe.

Performance, for me? RAID 0 off of a quality RAID PCIe card. I use a video streaming HDD disk array and a SSD sample array that way, and their speed is way superior to the individual drives, in both cases. Other than that, my other sample drives have been converted all to larger size individual SSD's, all backed-up to external back-up HDD's. Since they don't change often, this is a fairly efficient solution for me.


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## chimuelo (Feb 14, 2014)

Before, RAID 0/3/5/10 wasn't worth anything to me as the SATA III controller chips are bottlenecked at 500+ MBps.
This means, when there's a failure, you have the choice to rebuild, which nobody other than me will tell you makes straming samples impossible, as the drives simply act like 5400rpm drives using M Audio soundcards.

If you have TBolt 2, you should read up on the capabilities offered using Daisy Chaining and RAID.
You should be able to have redundancy in a single or multiple enclosure set up, and the speeds are insane.

But I haven't got a clue about which controller chipset Foxconn uses on their Mac mobos.

Personally I ordered the new ASRock Exteme 11ac and will be using RAID 10 with an all SAS HGST Ultrastar SSD800mm array.
Will definately get the TBolt 2 Lacie using 2 x Samsung XP941s' in a RAID 0 config too.
I am way past the CPU/RAM power these days, and only interested in streaming massive amounts of data with the highest IOps.

http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/ ... ry-leader/

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews ... sd-update/

I am pretty stoked as I have waited for years for such a board. Before this there were some proprietary boards, that needed the LSI Controller cards (400 USD), but this new LSI 3008 I/O design is built into the board with insane storage possibilities.

CPU and RAM offerings are just boring to me anymore.


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## Craig Sharmat (Feb 14, 2014)

Is that Lacie external? If so be careful about noise, I got a little big disk TB SSD and it whined and since I have to have it near me sent it back.

Purchased a Pegasus by Promise enclosure with 4 one TB drives over Thunderbolt and it is practically silent.


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## chimuelo (Feb 14, 2014)

I was referring to the Lacie TBolt 2 using the M2 PCI-e SSDs.
2 x Samsung XP941s in RAID 0.
It was hooked up to a MacPro at CES where they were archiving and transferring Video in various formats at high rates.
Didn't notice any noise, but it was a pretty loud event this year.

Then again my 1U server is so damn loud I am use to noise.
Looking forward to the Eurocom desktop replacement/laptops in 2014.
x79 parts and silence is what they are touting, along with the first 1TB bootable M2 PCI-e SSD for OS+Apps.


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## Robert Kooijman (Feb 15, 2014)

Just a bit surprised nobody mentions good RAID alternatives like Snapraid and Flexraid.

For 'typical' DAW usage, you might not really need RAID for increased data transfer rates with nowadays fast HDs or SSDs. That leaves you with the issue of data redundancy and back-up.

I would strongly *not* recommend traditional RAID solutions in a DAW.
First because of the added complexity, introducing only more point-of-failures.
Second, because when the RAID array itself fails (not just a drive but the RAID soft or hardware), it's virtually impossible to recover data. This, since you can no longer read any of the striped drives data outside of the failed RAID array.

An IMO much better solution is to use a disk-parity solution where all the data remains untouched on the drives. That way you can read or recover your samples, audio or video anytime anywhere on any computer if needed.

Two good solutions for this are Snapraid and Flexraid. I'm using both on two DAWs.
If you have Terrabytes of data that doesn't change too often (like sample libraries), spread over a few drives , I would recommend to hook-up a so called parity-drive and setup / run Snapraid (multi-platform & free). This gives you a lot less headaches when somethings goes wrong. It's not a 'true' and 100% safe back-up solution, but comes pretty close. Especially if you run another parity-drive that is located somewhere else (or cloud for those having a high upload-bandwith).

Then there's the possibility of drive-pooling (all files from different drives in one directory), but that's another topic


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 15, 2014)

Hey Robert, you sound like a nerd - in a good way! Question: is there a practical way to update off-site back-up drives over the internet? I have screen-sharing software, but nothing like this.

Translation: I have a big drive with everything backed up sitting in the basement at my parents' house. It needs updating; is there a good way to do that over the internet, or do I have to put it in my car?


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 15, 2014)

Sorry for the hijack, Craig.


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## Gusfmm (Feb 15, 2014)

Robert Kooijman @ Sat Feb 15 said:


> I would strongly *not* recommend traditional RAID solutions in a DAW.
> First because of the added complexity, introducing only more point-of-failures.



We have opposite viewpoints here. There is absolutely no complexity, you set-up a RAID, with a bit of understanding of what you're doing, and common sense, in two minutes. And for performance, my RAID 0 it's totally worth it. It is how I can run my two Velociraptors at close to 1,400MB/s sequential, or 275MB/s random which is SSD territory.




Robert Kooijman @ Sat Feb 15 said:


> An IMO much better solution is to use a disk-parity solution where all the data remains untouched on the drives. That way you can read or recover your samples, audio or video anytime anywhere on any computer if needed.
> 
> Two good solutions for this are Snapraid and Flexraid. I'm using both on two DAWs.
> If you have Terrabytes of data that doesn't change too often (like sample libraries), spread over a few drives , I would recommend to hook-up a so called parity-drive and setup / run Snapraid (multi-platform & free). This gives you a lot less headaches when somethings goes wrong. It's not a 'true' and 100% safe back-up solution, but comes pretty close. Especially if you run another parity-drive that is located somewhere else (or cloud for those having a high upload-bandwith).
> ...



I'm not so sure what your solution looks like, but you seem to be concerned about back up, not performance. Not my case. And I'd imagine that any user would have to have as much understanding of those RAID software packages, which in my mind sounds as complex as trying to set-up a RAID manually.

I really never heard of these suites before, so no experience here, but the other concern I'd have is doing RAID via software, and not truly hardware. How is the CPU load due to running the software and doing parity calculations in real time? How is the drive performance (speed) as a result? 

My recommendation for back-up purposes, is having individual external off-line drives that you hook-up once a month, leave them backing up your entire system overnight, and wake up in the morning to put them back in the fire safe. I keep two sets of drives, for redundancy. My library drives seldom change, and thus it is quite unnecessary to keep a fancy NAS arrangement up live 24x7x365. My project drive, which doesn't need to be a performance drive, is 2 WD RE3 in RAID 1 on a LSI RAID host card, which gives me enough comfort in between back-ups. Used to be 4 RE3 in RAID 10. Very traditional, simple, and reliable.


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## jleckie (Feb 15, 2014)

^ You do EXACTLY as I have ben doing for 15 years + with absolutely no issues.


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## Robert Kooijman (Feb 16, 2014)

Nick Batzdorf @ Sat Feb 15 said:


> Hey Robert, you sound like a nerd - in a good way! Question: is there a practical way to update off-site back-up drives over the internet? I have screen-sharing software, but nothing like this.
> 
> Translation: I have a big drive with everything backed up sitting in the basement at my parents' house. It needs updating; is there a good way to do that over the internet, or do I have to put it in my car?



Hi Nick,

Is your back-up drive hooked-up to a computer at your parents house? If so, there are a few different ways of doing this. For a decent level of security, you could set-up a VPN and 'see' the drive as a network drive at your place. Alternatively, you could make the drive part of a NAS. You could turn any PC into a NAS or easier, just buy one and add your drive. Either way will save you some petrol 

Some info on a VPN:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2419611,00.asp
NAS:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401086,00.asp




Gusfmm @ Sat Feb 15 said:


> Robert Kooijman @ Sat Feb 15 said:
> 
> 
> > I would strongly *not* recommend traditional RAID solutions in a DAW.
> ...



Regarding performance: parity-based RAID alternatives like Snapraid and Flexraid don't give you any additional performance compared to say RAID 0.

You get the performance of the (single) drive you're accessing, without any hardware or software overhead added. This is since Snapraid and Flexraid (the snapshot version) don't do anything at all when you're reading or writing data. In fact, drive access latency can be even better compared to RAID where parity needs to be calculated in real-time. So you don't need to worry about any sw or hw overhead, or use a hw RAID card.

If you *really* need higher read / write speeds then a single (hard)drive can offer, then 'traditional' RAID is arguably your best option.

http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/faq.html


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## EastWest Lurker (Feb 16, 2014)

With SSD prices coming dramatically down, for audio Raid seems to me to be an old fashioned and unnecessary solution.


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## rgames (Feb 16, 2014)

EastWest Lurker @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> With SSD prices coming dramatically down, for audio Raid seems to me to be an old fashioned and unnecessary solution.


UNLESS, of course, your goal is to run disk benchmarks.


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## Gusfmm (Feb 16, 2014)

Or unless you can demonstrate that disk benchmarks are not representative of real life performance. Until then, I stick to my guns.


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## Gusfmm (Feb 16, 2014)

EastWest Lurker @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> With SSD prices coming dramatically down, for audio Raid seems to me to be an old fashioned and unnecessary solution.




Just exactly as vacuum tubes are an old fashioned component in a guitar amp sound. Just ask Santana, Vai, or Clapton (or a gazillion others) about them to see what they think.


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## EastWest Lurker (Feb 16, 2014)

Gusfmm @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> EastWest Lurker @ Sun Feb 16 said:
> 
> 
> > With SSD prices coming dramatically down, for audio Raid seems to me to be an old fashioned and unnecessary solution.
> ...



You are _seriously_ going to compare digital storage, which has NO aesthetic component. to analog sound, which clearly does?

Look up sophistry in the dictionary


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 16, 2014)

Without Raid0 my SSDs are the bottleneck.
With Raid0 my CPU is the bottleneck.

That's in a sample slave, streaming samples in VE Pro in Windows 7. The AS-SSD benchmark correlate nicely with real world performance.

Reliability in terms of data loss of your Raid sample volume, is a non-issue. If a drives fails, you recreate the array using a spare drive that you have in sotck, and copy the data from the backup.


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## Gusfmm (Feb 16, 2014)

So you're saying there is no aesthetics in ensuring your main music production tool works as optimally as possible??? Don't call me next time you have audio drop-outs in your mixdowns.

You are arguing for the sake of arguing, your early Sunday morning comment. And I know that's you Jay. So no hard feelings. But you need to be more conscious as of how you qualify certain things, specially if you don't fully understand what you're trying to qualify.


p.s. seriously, RAID is as much critical of a PC system component as a vacuum tube is to a quality guitar amp sound.


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## EastWest Lurker (Feb 16, 2014)

Gusfmm @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> So you're saying there is no aesthetics in ensuring your main music production tool works as optimally as possible??? Don't call me next time you have audio drop-outs in your mixdowns.
> 
> You are arguing for the sake of arguing, your early Sunday morning comment. And I know that's you Jay. So no hard feelings. But you need to be more conscious as of how you qualify certain things, specially if you don't fully understand what you're trying to qualify.



The difference in performance between raided SSDs and regular SSDs, however much or little it is, is _far_ less an aesthetic factor in creating music than the decision of whether you are overdriving an actual tube amplifier or a digital sim of one should be obvious.

And I don't have audio dropouts in my mix downs.


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## Gusfmm (Feb 16, 2014)

How was talking about aesthetics to begin with???


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## EastWest Lurker (Feb 16, 2014)

Gusfmm @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> How was talking about aesthetics to begin with???



"Just exactly as vacuum tubes are an old fashioned component in a guitar amp sound. Just ask Santana, Vai, or Clapton (or a gazillion others) about them to see what they think."


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## Gusfmm (Feb 16, 2014)

Absolutely no mention of aesthetics, or did you miss the "old fashioned component" part? Wasn't that your argument to begin with?

Listen, enjoy your morning java in sunny Cal, we northeasterns have little time for silly argumentations and a lot of snow to plow outside.


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## EastWest Lurker (Feb 16, 2014)

Gusfmm @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> Absolutely no mention of aesthetics, or did you miss the "old fashioned component" part? Wasn't that your argument to begin with?
> 
> Listen, enjoy your morning java in sunny Cal, we northeasterns have little time for silly argumentations and a lot of snow to plow outside.



The ONLY reason those guys use tubes is aesthetic, namely the sound. The ONLY reason.

Great sound is never old fashioned, technology can be,

And btw, I am well aware how Raids work and have been for 10 years and if it were video editing, I would want it, but for audio with today's SSDs, I think it is overkill.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 16, 2014)

> UNLESS, of course, your goal is to run disk benchmarks



So Richard and I do have something in common after all.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 16, 2014)

Thanks Robert, I'll look into VPN. The drive isn't attached to a computer, but of course I'd plug it into one for that (I'd probably just bring my laptop). I could then do the updates from there, controlling my computers at home over the internet.

But the gas wouldn't be a factor - if not more often, we drive over there for brunch on Sunday anyway.


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## dinerdog (Feb 16, 2014)

I have looked into a lot of solutions also, Raids, Crashplan etc, etc...

There's SOOOO many opinions and variations, my head was spinning. I have a friend who does multiple Raids, AND Backblaze AND Crashplan. I believe Copy and Gobbler are in there somewhere too. He's a mastering engineer, so he can't sleep unless failure is amazingly low. Overkill I say.

What I ended up doing was getting some 4TB Hitachi's and 2TB WD Passport's and Carbon Copy Cloner. In a few days I had backups of EVERYTHING. I could rest while seeing if there was anything better. It was so simple, there's no excuse not to just back it up. I can clone whenever I want. Connect once a week or set them to backup at night, anything. 

At least it's done (and rather economically). Make a boot drive of your internal and then whatever else you need. Backup to drives you don't need, any combination is easy. I know the guys at Bombich software are very helpful if you need help. Boom, done. You can rest the moment it's done. It's the first time I've had EVERYTHING backed up.


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## chimuelo (Feb 16, 2014)

Well SnapRAID was a very nice treat for me, so thanks for posting it.
I can basically set up an old NetCell RAID 3 array that video archivers used years back that was basically too expensive with a group of Raptors.

And being a former anti RAID guy I can tell you that if you are using NCW files RAID 0 misn't necessary but with PLAY where there's no purge of editing capabilities your only work around is a patch at a time to get decent workflow results.

By using the LSI 3008 SAS Controller I plan on bypassing the SATA III 6GBps restrictions and screw the benchmarks, these are real world results. I will load entire PLAY or VSL instruments for immediate recall, so I might finally use these instrument in a live performance w/o load restrictions and won't need to go to the Crap table or sports book while the template loads.

SnapRAID is something I learned here that I suggest other guys read, unless you are happy with the SATA III bottlenecks you've learned to work around.

I am happy to finally say I can buy PLAY now without having those dreadful load times and performance issues I have read about for years.

Loading an entire template right now takes too much time unless it's an all NCW based template.
We ae way past those restrictions now.

Rejoice is you perfrom live with these massive resource hogging instruments.
Brute force and speed will easily overcome this now.


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## Robert Kooijman (Feb 16, 2014)

Nick Batzdorf @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> Thanks Robert, I'll look into VPN. The drive isn't attached to a computer, but of course I'd plug it into one for that (I'd probably just bring my laptop). I could then do the updates from there, controlling my computers at home over the internet.
> 
> But the gas wouldn't be a factor - if not more often, we drive over there for brunch on Sunday anyway.



Indeed, the social factor could be a good reason to continue bringing the backup with you 
But there's another advantage: if this is your only 'real' back-up, you might want to keep it from the internet anyway just to be on the safe side...

Regarding the "to RAID or not to RAID" discussion:
I agree with Jay that for audio use it is likely just overkill. Even using 'normal' disk drives, there are a lot of sample-voices or audio channels possible as long as you don't stream everything from the same physical drive at the same time.
Of course, heavy (HD) video editing is another story.

The reason why I mentioned Snapraid and Flexraid to begin with, was to help Craig here.

Pro's
- you don't need change anything or any data on your drives
- the data on your drives remains as is and can be read as is
- hard drives that are not accessed can spin down (sleep)
- your 'back-up' drive size doesn't have to be bigger then the largest drive in use
- there's no additional process or overhead involved
- you don't need a RAID controller

Con's_
- there's no real-time redundancy (unless you use Flexraid RT)
- back-ups or so called syncs are either scheduled or started manually
- you won't win the first prize in a DAW disk read / write benchmark contest


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## Nathanael Iversen (Feb 16, 2014)

Here's a study:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd ... ,2848.html

another:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... raid0.html


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 16, 2014)

chimuelo @ Sun 16 Feb said:


> SnapRAID is something I learned here that I suggest other guys read, unless you are happy with the SATA III bottlenecks you've learned to work around.
> 
> I am happy to finally say I can buy PLAY now without having those dreadful load times and performance issues I have read about for years.
> 
> ...


???
From the SnapRaid page: "SnapRAID is a backup program for disk arrays. It stores parity information of your data and it's able to recover from up to six disk failures. "

How does that help you load your PLAY libraries faster? I think it doesn't. It can rebuild a volume for you if one (or up to six) of your disks fails. Be aware that it will definitely take some time and processor cycles to make all the necessary parity calculations in order to reconstruct the data. It's often faster to copy the data back from a fast backup storage.

The LSI SAS 3008 is a PCIe x8 card, offering 8 ports, with Sata 6Gbps and SAS 12Gbps. Hooking up 8 Sata6 drives give you 4k64 bandwidth close to 3GByte/s. Hooking up horrendously expensive SAS12 SSDs might give you double that. At this time however it's more economic to double the controller and have a total of 16 Sata6 SSDs.

For more than two years I have been enjoying blazingly fast Play load speeds using a cheap PCIe x8 Sata/Raid controller card (2720SGL) with 8 x 256GB SSDs, as have some other folks around here with the old OCZ PCIe Z-Drive and RevoDrive cards for even longer than that. No need for exotic hardware or software. It's been right here for years. You just need to make the right choice, it's really not that hard.


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## Gusfmm (Feb 16, 2014)

niversen @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> Here's a study:
> 
> http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd ... ,2848.html
> 
> ...




Nice references, thanks lots for sharing!

But, you know what they'll say, these are just geeks running these weird synthetic tests, with absolutely not applicability to real life conditions. So, RAID is totally overkill and useless. 



(now, between you and I, don't tell anyone, my 11GB string template used to take about 1:30 to load off of two individual SanDisk Extreme SSD drives, and now it loads in about 30s, off of a Crucial M500 SSD's (SLOWER drives!) RAID0 array measured at 600MB/s random throughput, so that's what I call real life performance improvement)


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 16, 2014)

Gusfmm @ Sun 16 Feb said:


> Nice references, thanks lots for sharing!
> 
> But, you know what they'll say, these are just geeks running these weird synthetic tests, with absolutely not applicability to real life conditions. So, RAID is totally overkill and useless.
> 
> ...




(Imagine how fast your 55GB template could load using a 8 x Samsung EVO 250GB Raid0 volume)


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## rgames (Feb 16, 2014)

Scrianinoff @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> Without Raid0 my SSDs are the bottleneck.
> With Raid0 my CPU is the bottleneck.


How many voices do you get from the various libraries when you hit those bottlenecks?

I've not found any difference in voice count once the drive speed got over about 400 MB/s. I've tested VSL, Kontakt, and PLAY and the voice counts are the same for drives that benched at 400 MB/s, 550 MB/s and hardware RAID 0 at 700 or 800 MB/s (these references are the max read speeds in ATTO disk benchmark).

The most I can get is about 1500 voices from VSL, about 1250 from Kontakt (LASS) and about 160 from PLAY (Hollywood Brass Diamond). The voice counts are also the same on both an i5 2500k (4 cores) and an i7 4930k (12 cores).

I think the voice count is much more dependent on the disk seek time, not CPU or read speed. My tests seem to indicate that dependence, anyway. That's why I'm curious to know what sorts of voice counts you're getting - if your voice counts scale with the read speed then I wonder what's different about our setups.

rgames


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 16, 2014)

rgames @ Sun 16 Feb said:


> Scrianinoff @ Sun Feb 16 said:
> 
> 
> > Without Raid0 my SSDs are the bottleneck.
> ...



4k64 of AS-SSD takes into account both seek time (because it's random access reads, not sequential) and raw read speed (because it uses incompressible data). In my tests, voice count and template load times correlate very well with the AS-SSD 4k64 values, but not with the sequential read speeds. You keep referring to the sequential read speeds. It's now the about the tenth time I am pointing you to these results which subscribe to both our results: http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtop ... 44#3744544

Look at the figures. You talk about read speeds under hardware Raid-0 using ATTO, which is a sequential block read test for several block sizes of compressible data. In the figure and the explanation in the linked thread you see that Intel hits a 115% increase in 4k64 throughput using a 'hardware' Raid0 of 2 SSDs, i.e. from 383MB/s to 443MB/s. You wouldn't notice much difference in voice count. On the basis of the AS-SSD 4k64 benchmark you could have predicted that. You would have been surprised if you only took into account the sequential throughput that hits over 900MBytes/s, something which you consistently keep doing. With Windows Raid you see that the 4k64 scales much better (from 383MB/s to 727MB/s), as does the real world voice count. I suggest you try it and make another splendid video about this.

If you do, start up "Resource Monitor" too. Go to the "Disk" tab and look at the "Active Time" column in the "Storage" sub-window. Using a single SSD or JBOD configuration, which is storage bound and not cpu bound, you will see that active time is close to 100%, meaning that indeed the storage subsystem is the bottleneck. Now redo your test using a good Raid configuration, that is Windows Raid or a REAL hardware Raid and not an advertised Intel chipset hardware-well-uhm-really-just-a-shoddy-driver-software-based Raid0 and you'll see that it is the CPU that is now close to 100% (or close to 50% in a hampered hyperthreading configuration), while the storage Active Times are most of the time well below 100%. Note that the queue depths displayed by Resource Monitor are not compatible with the definition of queue depth specified by SSD manufacturers or specified in benchmarks. You can find a lot of information what all these values displayed by Resource Monitor mean exactly, but it's not very interesting here and now. For more fine grained performance monitoring you can use "Performance Monitor". However, Resource Monitor should give you enough information to base your _sound _judgement on.


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## rgames (Feb 16, 2014)

Scrianinoff @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> 4k64 of AS-SSD takes into account both seek time (because it's random access reads, not sequential) and raw read speed (because it uses incompressible data). In my tests, voice count and template load times correlate very well with the AS-SSD 4k64 values, but not with the sequential read speeds. You keep referring to the sequential read speeds. It's now the about the tenth time I am pointing you to these results which subscribe to both our results: http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtop ... 44#3744544
> 
> Look at the figures. You talk about read speeds under hardware Raid-0 using ATTO, which is a sequential block read test for several block sizes of compressible data. In the figure and the explanation in the linked thread you see that Intel hits a 115% increase in 4k64 throughput using a 'hardware' Raid0 of 2 SSDs, i.e. from 383MB/s to 443MB/s. You wouldn't notice much difference in voice count. On the basis of the AS-SSD 4k64 benchmark you could have predicted that. You would have been surprised if you only took into account the sequential throughput that hits over 900MBytes/s, something which you consistently keep doing. With Windows Raid you see that the 4k64 scales much better (from 383MB/s to 727MB/s), as does the real world voice count. I suggest you try it and make another splendid video about this.
> 
> If you do, start up "Resource Monitor" too. Go to the "Disk" tab and look at the "Active Time" column in the "Storage" sub-window. Using a single SSD or JBOD configuration, which is storage bound and not cpu bound, you will see that active time is close to 100%, meaning that indeed the storage subsystem is the bottleneck. Now redo your test using a good Raid configuration, that is Windows Raid or a REAL hardware Raid and not an advertised Intel chipset hardware-well-uhm-really-just-a-shoddy-driver-software-based Raid0 and you'll see that it is the CPU that is now close to 100% (or close to 50% in a hampered hyperthreading configuration), while the storage Active Times are most of the time well below 100%. Note that the queue depths displayed by Resource Monitor are not compatible with the definition of queue depth specified by SSD manufacturers or specified in benchmarks. You can find a lot of information what all these values displayed by Resource Monitor mean exactly, but it's not very interesting here and now. For more fine grained performance monitoring you can use "Performance Monitor". However, Resource Monitor should give you enough information to base your judgement on.


And your voice counts are...???


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 16, 2014)

rgames @ Sun 16 Feb said:


> And your voice counts are...???


For my laptop with a 4.1GHz 3820QM, 32 GB and using 2 x 1TB Samsung EVO drives. It's roughly 1.5 times the individual SSD drives, or Intel chipset Raid0 voice count. Note that due to the CPU being the bottleneck the factor 1.5 is bound by the CPU. With a faster CPU the storage would become the bottleneck again and based on the AS-SSD you can predict it would go to roughly 1.9x (727MB/s / 383MB/s) 

For my desktop the voice count scaling is about 6x for a 2600k on 4.5GHz with 32GB. The 4k64 is just above 1GByte/s due to older 8 x Crucial M4 drives, which have an individual 4k64 of around 180MB/s. The Raid0 1GBytes/s though, is higher than the 727MB/s of the laptop (using only 2 SSDs). If I compare the voice counts of the Raid0 Desktop to the Raid0 Laptop, the desktop is just 20% (1.2x) more capable. However, since both are CPU bound, you just see that the CPU is 20% more capable.

The reason I can confidently compare the performance of the desktop to the laptop is that it's exactly the same project, using exactly the same samples, using exactly the same articulations, using exactly the same notes, using exactly the same timings.

A comparison of absolute voice count numbers between forum members, who use different samples, different articulations, different notes, and different timings, would be meaningless.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Feb 16, 2014)

Robert:



> if this is your only 'real' back-up



No way! This is my third back-up, off-site in case the house burns down (please no!).

I have a Time Machine back-up going all the time, plus an image of my main drive in a working state - updated every time I change anything.


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## rgames (Feb 16, 2014)

Scrianinoff @ Sun Feb 16 said:


> A comparison of absolute voice count numbers between forum members, who use different samples, different articulations, different notes, and different timings, would be meaningless.


You're right - that's why you test a range of sample libraries. They're all different. I tested VSL, Kontakt, and PLAY and gave examples for each. That covers pretty much everyone on this forum, so such a comparison is extremely useful.

I agree that what you're saying makes sense but I've had this same discussion many times and still nobody has shown that voice count (which we care about) and read speed benchmarks (which we don't care about) are related. Sequential read, random read, whatever - pick whichever one you want. But the benchmark is not the result we care about, it's the voice count. So whichever benchmark you pick, you need to show how it relates to voice count.

It's kind of like horsepower in racecars. Sure, horsepower probably is related to lap times. But would you just show up at the track with your dyno reading and declare a theoretical lap time? Of course not - you still need to measure the lap time. Sure, it seems they should be related, but until you put some numbers to that relationship it's impossible to say.

I'm open to the idea that the read speed is related to voice count but until someone gives me something meaningful to compare against, I can't accept it because I have never been able to show it. Apparently you have, so please share your insights.

rgames


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 16, 2014)

rgames @ Sun 16 Feb said:


> How many voices do you get from the various libraries when you hit those bottlenecks?
> 
> I've not found any difference in voice count once the drive speed got over about 400 MB/s. I've tested VSL, Kontakt, and PLAY and the voice counts are the same for drives that benched at 400 MB/s, 550 MB/s and hardware RAID 0 at 700 or 800 MB/s (these references are the max read speeds in ATTO disk benchmark).
> 
> ...



Well, if you think it's meaningful, look at this: http://youtu.be/ZUr1Wekl9yk

I am able stream more than 400 voices using Play 3, you're streaming only 160 voices.
I am using Hollywood Strings Diamond which is heavier than Hollywood Brass that you are using.
I am using a poor old MacBook with a Core 2 Duo at 2.4GHz and MacOS ,you're using a 2500K at 4GHz and Windows 7?
I am using a Kingston V100 512GB SSD with a pathetic 4k64 value of below 100MByte/s and a sequential throughput of only 200MByte/s (it's SataII), you're using an SSD with a 4k64 between 100MB/s and 200MB/s (Agility3 / M4)?
My test is 2.5 years old, your test is half a year old.
Still I am getting more than 2.5 x the voice count. How can that be?


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## chimuelo (Feb 16, 2014)

FWIW the LSI 3008 SAS is a card, but in my case I am using it's chips built into a motherboard with an additional 3x24 Extender chip. The HGSTs are all 12GBps and will be much faster while having a realtime rebuild capability as I use 8% of a CPU.
My horsepower comes from external DSP racks made specifically for realtime parameter modulation, thus leaving the entire CPU for a rebuild if a failure were to occur.
I have built the last 6 DAWs I use 6 nights a week, the first 4 were redundant spares as I distrusted RAID, and preferred a 32 channel analog switcher, like they use in most shows.
So while you have a nice DAW designed to do what you want, I doubt I could use it for my type of work. My goal is very little CPU usage, next to nothing GFX needs, and external DSP number crunching and real hardware synthesizers.
The new motherboard and HGSTs will first use the provided LSI RAID options, but I do like the parity design of SnapRAID.

I will simply test the RAID rebuild as I did years ago with SCSI Seagate Cheetahs in RAID 5 using the Supermicro P4SCT+II and low profile Zero Channel RAID 5 card Adpatec made for them.
That rebuild was what changed my mind about using RAID up unitl recently.
However that particular build is 8 years old, still has the ancient CPU and Scope DSP cards with Gigastudio 2.67. 

But at the end of the day I will use RAID and HGSTs as it is far cheaper than the 32 Channel Analog switcher I would have to purchase again.


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 16, 2014)

chimuelo @ Mon 17 Feb said:


> But at the end of the day I will use RAID and HGSTs as it is far cheaper than the 32 Channel Analog switcher I would have to purchase again.


These? http://www.hgst.com/solid-state-storage ... r-ssd800mh

My condolences to your wallet.


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## chimuelo (Feb 16, 2014)

I won't be paying the prices you see on Amazon or other sites. It will be 50 % of the retail. The beauty of it is they will also buy all instruments from developers too.
The risk to me is that if I lose the audition, it's my expense, which will be no biggie as I will recover that after 1 month of work.

But the beauty of the deal is when I do win, I then hand them a manifest for a build and they cut a check. This includes all instruments and wardrobe too.
So they will buy whatever I am lacking now, plus the build I will do before May auditions happen. Since I already subbed twice for the same show, it's practically a shoe in.

But I have lost auditions before too. They are totally painful and cause me months of rededication to site reading and other practicing I normally wouldn't bother with.

Your voice counts were most refreshing for me. I never bothered yet since I always used NCW instruments only, and SATA III 6GBps was fast enough.
But this show is heavy Orchestral and I know I will be using HS, HB and other monsterous instruments.

My experience with them is freinds only, but I can still remember BBB Full requiring 2 x Macs just to run and still needed patches loaded.
Thankfully most guys I know have super powerful x79s w/ 64GBs each and PCI-e SSDs with built in RAID, so I surely know we are way past NCW now.

My biggest advantage is the hardware effects and DSP effects/mixing. I refuse to not use my ancient PCM70, on headphones it sounds the same as the best DSP and Native FX, but in realtime over large arrays it drips from the speakers, where as the other effects seem to be a little more distant. Plus it needs no upgrade or CPU since it was made in 1985.... :mrgreen:

Cheers too, as the Nederlands is up there with Mother Russia and the USSRA in medal counts. Impressive for such a small nation.

The HGSTs will be 200GB versions. If they run as advertised I will be using a total of 8. But will also still have another 1U running Kontakts NCW stuff. Do not wish to blend them both together just yet. Especially since Kontakt still streams from old Raptor 1500s just fine.


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## Scrianinoff (Feb 16, 2014)

@chimuelo
Well in that case, that's excellent. You will have quite the setup there. You're right about other requirements that count in a live setup. I don't know whether I would trust my DAW for a live setup. In the 80s and 90s I used to play live too, only using dedicated synths and mostly real pianos. Using anything that's computer based sounds a bit scary to me. 'The show must go on' and that kind of thing. If I would need to do it, I would probably go for an identical twin system, that's ready to take over in a second, literally. I really liked what you did in building your 1U PC system.

Good luck with it! I would like to see you perform one day, when I visit Vegas.


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## chimuelo (Feb 17, 2014)

Thanks bro, and I was nervous about Sampler FDDs and 5 1/4" FDDs for my hardware sequencer back then, so I have been nervous for 25 years as I rely more and more on this stuff for the sake of quality sampled instrument playback.
ROMPLERS suck so bad, it's worth the risk for me.

Cheers.


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## chimuelo (Mar 5, 2014)

RAID or not, this is a beast of a motherboard.

http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews ... 850k-iops/


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## synthetic (May 4, 2021)

Bumping an old thread. Considering a new macOS system with external drives. Two possibilities for this system: 

1. A data (session) drive, and another drive for samples. 
2. One RAID 5 system connected via Thunderbolt for both session data and samples. 

Years ago, running samples and data from a single drive would have seemed like madness. But I wonder what the bottleneck would be with a Thunderbolt 3 RAID system. If I had two RAID 5 drives connected over Thunderbolt, one for samples and one for data, would that really be any faster than one big system? 

Has anyone tried working this way?


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## babylonwaves (May 5, 2021)

Craig Sharmat said:


> This may have been covered before but I want to get some opinions on my particular setup if you don't mind.
> 
> I bought a enclosure with which I placed 4 1 TB SSD drives in which will go through thunderbolt on a new Mac trash can. I am contemplating raiding them but know the dangers are if one drive goes down essentially it messes with everything. I am thinking maybe they are fast enough drives to not be raided but I don't really know....thus my post.
> 
> Thanks in advance for opinions.


I have a 4x 2gb SSD RAID optimised for speed. I probably wouldn't do it again because Kontakt and other players seem to not benefit from the throughput a lot. My second RAID is currently 3x 2GB NVME and this time JBDO. doesn't really make difference, the NVMEs are faster but even if they wouldn't I don't think it makes a difference for audio. In the video world, I'd probably think differently about that.


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