Are any of you doing a Raid 1 or 0 with your system?


If you are doing a Raid 0 with your system, do you see any real performance gains?

My current system is configured this way with no Raid:
Drive bay 1: system
Drive bay 2: sample library
Drive bay 3: Kontakt library
Drive bay 4: project files / downloads


Is there a more optimal way to see performance gain?

 

Not on my pc but on my NAS's Raid 5.

 

raid 0 its too risky, only worth if you will use large libs.
FIRST: where is your backups?
I have 2 raid 5 on my main computer, one with 4 and other with 6 disks + backups.

 

Last edited: Oct 13, 2016

Drive bay 1: SSD system
Drive bay 2: HDD sample library
Drive bay 3: SSD/HDD Kontakt library
Drive bay 4: HDD project files / downloads

...all drives should have a form of backup (cloud, NAS or at least some 2.5" TB drives)

 

Sweet. thanks for the advise. I'll have to wait on this option until I find some more money

 

Drive Bay 1 SSD.
NAS Raid 5 everything else min 3 drives.

 

Any RAID will boost data transfer rate but not really improve access times.
That's especially relevant if you're using conventional hard drives in the array.
Because sample libraries usually contain many small files, you will most likely see more performance gain by using an SSD.
Even if you have large .NKX sample files, access times matter because depending on what notes you play at what velocity, multiple randomly positioned sections inside the .NKX file have to be accessed.
A RAID is certainly great for backup purposes and applications where large sequential chunks of data have to be read or written.
Make sure you use bulletproof RAID software (or hardware), I have seen RAID arrays fail more than once due to bugs in the rebuild procedure or bugs in the detection of faulty drives.

Using RAID Level 0 is, sorry, plain stupid imho. If you don't want your data to be lost, you surely don't want to increase the probability of a complete RAID failure.
You could either add another drive and build a RAID5 with 3 drives, or put two RAID1 mirrors into a RAID0, but with 4 disk drives you're better off with RAID5 anyway.

I hope my little essay wasn't too puzzling

 

another thing is what kind of raid.
From your board: not a really a real raid, poor performance and security (tested but never used)
real Hardware raid: (have one) the real beast, with a fast ram is insane. My old satas (pre hybrid with ssds) in raid 5 with 6 disks (one is redundant) read at 737 mbs/second (half for backup and kontakt)... this is juslt an old LSI sata 1 with 256mb of ram... 20 bucks in ebay.
Software: there are great ones, i use Softraid for OS X. with 4 new hybrid disk with raid 5 (one is redundant) I got 370 mbs/sec. With a real hardware probably I can get around 600 mbs/sec or more (half for vsts and half for back up-really fast backups)