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videoeditor246346
Inspiring
July 30, 2017
Question

RAID0 - is it worth it?

  • July 30, 2017
  • 1 reply
  • 2867 views

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).

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    1 reply

    Bill Gehrke
    Bill Gehrke
    Inspiring
    July 30, 2017

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

    V
    videoeditor246346Author
    Inspiring
    July 31, 2017

    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.

    R
    RjL190365
    Legend
    August 3, 2017

    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

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