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  • Questions about RAID setup

    S
    S

    According to tests conducted by the Arizona Mac Users Group with an Areca ARC-1221x PCIe RAID card in a MacPro and array of eight Seagate 320GB drives ($80.00 per drive at NewEgg,com)

    http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/areca/1221x/

     a RAID 5 array witha 2.04 TB capacity averaged 420MBS read and 438 MBS write (the average is a result of testing at capacities from 0% to 100% full (e.g. at 50% full the numbers are 457MBS write and 446 MBS read). A RAID 6 array (which can suffer two drive failures and rebuild itself as opposed to a RAID 5 array which can suffer only one drive failure and rebuild itself) with the same number of drives and 1.75 TB capacity, averaged 359 MBS read and 377 MBS write. This setup is significantly faster and much less expensive than the Apple RAID card and 4 15,000 RPM SAS drives (Apple advertises a maximum read/write of 250 MBS.) (The Areca card is $650 at NewEgg.com, the Enhance Box E8ML eight bay enclosure is $442.82 from NowDirect, the two necessary cables are $120.00 - - for both from Amazon).

    Significantly, the Areca 1221x appears to be unique among currently available 3rd party RAID cards for the MacPro in that one can boot from drives attached to it. Drives attached to current PCIe cards made by Firmtek, Sonnet or, as far as I know, any other manufacturer are not bootable as their drivers load during startup, where as the Areca card's driver is in its (upgradeable) firmware. 

    My question is this: is there some drawback to using this setup simultaneously as a statup drive and as a sample drive? I know that the usual recommended setup is for a separate startup drive and a drive or RAID 0 array for the sample libraries, but this setup is far faster than that simpler setup would be. I am hoping for comment from someone at VSL regarding this as well as other forum participants.

    Thanks 
  • J
    J

    Stevesong,

    Do we know if we can use Bootcamp with this RAID card?

    I understand that we cannot use Bootcamp with the Apple RAID/SAS setup.

    The reason I mention Bootcamp is because (at least for the time being) there is no 64bit version of VE3 for Mac. And to get 64bit performance we would have to use XP64 or Vista as the OS on a MacPro slave machine. It sure would be good to find out what the projected timeline is for this from the VSL people.

    Thanks,

    Jack

  • S
    S

     This card is advertised as supporting Windows and pretty much every other current OS - - so, since a MacPro running Vista or XP via Bootcamp would seem to be, for all intents and purposes, a Windows machine it seems reasonable to expect it would work However, you should contact Areca for a certain answer to your question.

    Email 1: support@areca.com.tw
    E-mail 2: sales@areca.com.tw 

    (These addresses appear to be in Taiwan) 

    Their website is http://www.areca.us/ 
  • J
    J

    Hi Stevesong,

     

    I’ve spent a bunch of time investigating this. I did send an email to Areca 48 hrs. ago but still haven’t received a reply as of yet.

     

    However, this seems like it might be the way to go in order to achieve SAS-type results and still be able to run Bootcamp on the slave MacPro. (Areca RAID card, 8-bay external enclosure w/ 8 x 320GB SATA drives in RAID 6 configuration)

     

    I’d even go so far as to say that I might use this on both machines I plan to get shortly: an 8-core 3.2 GHZ MacPro w/ 16GB RAM for the main DAW machine (Logic) and a quad-core 2.8 GHz MacPro w/ 24 GB RAM to be used solely as a VE3 slave machine. (cm seemed to indicate previously that any more processors or speed would be overkill for a slave.)

     

    It solves the issue with running Bootcamp on the VE3 slave machine so I can take advantage of the 64 capability of VE3 for PC (not yet available on the Mac version & MacPro’s with SAS can’t run Bootcamp), it would seem to give me throughput and access times not unlike SAS drives, I would have more drive space for the money than SAS drives, I would have more available unused space on the (RAID) drives allowing higher performance of the drives, the RAID 6 will give me fault-tolerant backup that I wouldn’t have on individual drives and I save a few hundred dollars.

     

    All in all, not a bad deal.  So I would simply order the basic versions of the two MacPro’s with the smallest available hard drive for the OS and add on the speific third-party RAM, RAID card, drives, cables and external drive enclosure.

     

    So thanks for sharing your investigations with us.

     

    Now so long as VE3 works and doesn’t have any latency issues everything should be fine.

     

    I wouldn’t mind if cm would chime in and give us his opinion on all this.

      

    Best regards,

    Jack

     

    PS,

    Have you figured out which would be the right cable combination between the RAID card and the enclosure?
  • S
    S

     Jack:

    Sounds like a good plan, but one bit more of research seems necessary in light of what Ithe folks at Areca wrote in response to my query:

    " if your application has to access data partition and system partition at same time. seperate raidsets (for OS and samples) will be a better choice because drives have good performance on sequential access, but poor on random access. i am not sure how bootcamp works, so i don't know this tool have such ability to support this feature or not - - but besically, all our controllers have driver to support OSX and Windows both."

    In other words, if it is confirmed that the Areca card will work with Bootcamp, do as you plan to and run the OS from a different drive and use the Windows driver for the Windows machine - - until such time as an OSX compatible 64-bit version of VE becomes available.  I am still not clear about the statement about drives having good performance on sequential access but poor on random access, nor am I clear that it would be a good idea to record to the raidset from which the samples are streamed (probably not is my guess). I would write to them about this and check with VSL support as well before proceeding. I will also post a question about using the Areca card with Bootcamp on the AMUG site.

    As to the cables - - it depends on the enclosure you want to use. The Enhance Box E8 enclosure reviewed by AMUG  requires two Mini SAS to Infiniband cables. They have links in the review to the Amazon pages where you can buy these cables ($38.43 each). If, on the other hand ,you have enclosures such as two Seritek 4 bay enclousres which have individual eSATA connections for each drive then you would need two Mini-SAS to eSATA cables each of which has one Mini SAS connector on one end and four eSATA connectors on the other. The AMUG review of the Areca card has links for this cable as well. 

    I hope this is helpful. Will continue researching it.  
  • J
    J

    Hi Stevesong,

     

    I really did omit a lot of information about what I plan for my system in my last email. I was under the impression that I was giving enough info. But apparently I wasn’t. My apologies.

     

    I plan to be recording audio onto a separate SATA audio drive in an open slot on the Master DAW.

     

    Bootcamp would be on a separate SATA boot drive on the Slave machine – until such time as VSL comes out with the 64-bit version of VE3. Then I plan to switch back to the Mac OS.

     

    Random Access performance is a bit of a mystery for me on this setup. I know throughput will be just dandy but I’m hoping that RAID 6 will give me fast random access for all the samples I want to playback simultaneously. Perhaps cm could add his thoughts about access times on a RAID with a fairly large number of drives (8 in this case) – as opposed to a couple separate, standalone drives.

     

    On my current system – a single G5 dual 2 Gig – I have an UltraSCSI card attached to an external enclosure with two 300GB 10K RPM UltraSCSI drives for playback of all my VSL samples. To make matters more difficult, the drives are 80% full. That won’t be the case on my new computers.

     

    On my new system I plan to have the RAID 6 setup on both machines. The Master DAW will have the samples for VSL woodwinds, Harp and Percussion (and various Kontakt libraries). I will be using a RME HDSPe MADI interface to get all the audio back into Logic. I’ll offload a lot of the audio processing onto a TC Powercore X8. I have another MOTU interface that I’ll use for mic input and for audio monitoring and headphone outputs.

     

    The slave machine will be dedicated to VSL strings, brass and when available, the choir. Of course all the audio will be piped back to the Master DAW via VE3’s ethernet.

     

    I’m pretty confident that this dual machine setup will have enough capacity to last me for some time to come. It will certainly give more playback capabilities than my current G5 setup.

     

    Thanks for the info on the cables.

     

    Jack

  • S
    S

    Jack: 

     If the entire purpose of the RAID you propose is to serve as a source for samples, you might want to consider RAID levels other than RAID 6.

    The great thing about RAID 6 is its redundancy - - being able to reconstruct itself in the event of two drive failures. However one already has a backup of the samples on the DVDs or, if one wishes to spend the time, one can, as I did, make disk images of all the DVDs and put them on a drive - - so that installation will be much faster than installing them from the DVDs. Thus you could opt for RAID 5 which is faster than RAID 6 but is less redundant - - that is it can rebuild itself after one drive failure, but not after 2 simultaneous drive failures, or a RAID 0 array which has no redundancy whatsoever and  fails if one drive goes.According to the AMUG tests, a RAID 5 array consisting of 8 320GB Seagate drives has an average speed of 438 MBS (write) and 420MBS (read). A RAID 0 array has an average speed of 505MBS (write) and 479 MBS (read).

    The main attraction to me of the Areca is that one can boot from a drive or an array that is attached to it. If this is not important to you, then you could consider the significantly less expensive cards such as the Highpoint RocketRAID 2522 card (which is capable of RAID 5 but not RAID 6) or a Sonnet Tempo E4P which can be used to create large RAID 0 arrays.  So, for me, another attraction of the Areca card is its flexibility - - you can elect to set it to JBOD mode, make bootable backup drives on one channel and use Disk Utilty to construct either a RAID 0 or RAID 0+1 array for the sample drives. 

    The main question remaining appears to be the effect of different RAID levels on Random reads. I would suggest writing to support@vsl.co.at for better information on this subject.
  • J
    J
    Hi Stevesong, I heard back from cm regarding his thoughts on this. I’m sure he’ll be OK with me sharing these. He says that there seems to be little reason to use a RAID configuration considering the current throughput and capacity of individual drives. He goes on to say that the MacPro at VSL are using Seagate 1TB drives that are delivering 72MB/s which was far enough to stream a complete arrangement from a single disk – as they did on their NAMM presentation computer. (So I can only imagine that using multiple individual drives could only help that case – especially access times.)  Let me directly quote him regarding another important issue:  “Consider the following for Bootcamp:A RAID card will need some driver (separate for OSX and Windows)And_probably_ these drivers are also used to configure the structure of the RAIDed hard disks….so you might end up with a configuration which is only accessible from one operating system (given the card also has driver for XP or Vista64 ready and working).” “A second point is the formatting: XP/Vista cannot read HFS+ partitions without third party tools (eg, macDrive) and there is no version out so far for 64 bit Windows systems… whereas OSX can read and does actually stream reliably from NTFS formatted disks.” “Again: Disks RAIDed under Windows might not be accessible from OSX.”  He summed it up by saying: “So my opinion would be: spend your money in RAM instead of some RAID and/or SAS equipment, and in case needed, spread your libraries across 2 internal disks, so having still one for system and one for recording….SAS disks are fast but expensive and have low capacity.” “If you think to need more space, I’d rather consider an external Fibre RAID enclosure using the macPro Fibre card option to connect. This should be an overall more satisfying solution… “PS:Note Bootcamp wizard does only start if the initially created system volume resides on a disk with only one single partition.”  So…perhaps for me, going with the simple, 4 individual SATA disks within the Master DAW (1- OS, 2- Samples, 3- Samples and 4- record drive) and 3 individual SATA disks in the Slave DAW (1- OS, 2- Samples and 3- Samples) would, after all is said and done, work fine. And of course it’ll be much less expensive and easier to install. There could enough issues getting all the software (not just the VSL software) migrated from the G5 to the MacPro’s with proper re-authorization & re-registration.  Best regards,Jack    

    EDIT - I have no idea why all the paragraph formatting was lost this time. I did it on a PC with Explorer. Tried it 3 times. My apologies, it was a lot easier to read when it was properly formatted. -

  • S
    S

     Jack:

    Thanks so much for sharing the valuable information you got from Christian. For me there is an additional problem in that I would like a card that is bootable because I would like to retain a backup system similar to that I currently employ with my G5.  I back up to removable hard drives both via Retrospect (which allows for retrieval of multiple versions of a document backed up at different times) and via clones of the startup drive made with Carbon Copy Cloner which, because it backs up block by block, produces clones with software licenses intact.  I rotate three clones and two Retrospect backup drives so that several drives are offsite at all times. The idea is that, in the event of a startup drive failure, I would be able to continue working right away from a cloned drive with a minimal loss of data - - and in the event of a building collapse or fire (assuming that I survived and, therefore cared! [:)]) I would lose a maximum of one week's work.

    On my G5 I have a relatively inexpensive Firmtek PCIx card that allows one to boot from drives attached to the card. On a MacPro there are, as far as I know, currently no inexpensive PCIe SATA cards that allow one to boot from attached drives - indeed the Areca card appears to be the only currently available OSX compatible PCIe SATA card with boot capability.  Hence my initial interest in this card. I could do backups with a much less expensive PCIe (non-bootable) SATA card but would not be able to test cloned drives unless I put the drives inside the MacPro - - obviously not an entirely convenient arrangement. So, I will keep pondering the best course for me. The Areca card and external drives cost more than I would like, but still they would appear to provide a backup solution that is far less expensive, much faster and far more reliable than tape. As you might guess, my experience with computers is long enough to have included a few quite memorable near death experiences involving potential (and once at least, actual) loss of important data. 

  • E
    E
    Great information in this thread. I'm in the process of upgrading from a G5 system to the new MacPro and also playing with some RAID ideas. So far, most of the discussion about Read/Write speeds of the various configurations, are about streaming samples. As was mentioned in the quote from cm, the drive speed might be fast enough for streaming. However I have another aspect that is even more important in my workflow. The speed of loading the samples (or the fraction of it) into the plug-in A main bottleneck (aka wasted time) is the load time. And it doesn't matter if it is VI, Spectrasonics, EastWest, etc. I'm wondering if the access speed to the samples on the drive (RAID or no RAID), improves the loading time or is the bottleneck the plug-in itself: How fast does the plug-in setup the incoming data before it is ready to play. Any infos/ideas about that?
  • S
    S

     Edgar:

    What are you using for samples at present? The major time waster for me is the license scanning process - - prior to loading samples. The first thing I do every morning is launch the VE standalone - - even if I don't plan to use it, then go get some coffee. If I don't plan to use the standalone, I quit it. After the license scanning process has taken place it isn't repeated until after a reboot - - so I can use the VI or VE plugins without going through this process.  Loading the samples from my simple RAID 0 array is reasonably fast on my G5. I will let you know what happens when I get a MacPro. 

    As an aside, I received further information from Areca: the tech support person said it was possible to create multiple RAID arrays with one card, so that one could have, for example, a RAID 5 array for the OS, applications and documents and a RAID 0 array for samples - - and, he seemed to suggest, a separate non RAID backup volume. I will continue my inquiry.