Re: [LAU] drive bays and hardware RAID

Yo, back on Tuesday 04 May 2010 plutek was all like:
>
> greetings!
>
> i'm looking at my pile of external audio drives and backup drives, and wondering about better solutions.
>
> a friend has recently mentioned multiple-drive bays, which allow you to swap raw drives in/out at will, eliminating all the individual enclosures. we also had a discussion about bays which implement hardware RAID for realtime mirroring.
>
> i'm wondering if any of you have experience with these sorts of devices in the context of linux multitrack audio work. specific concerns might be things like:
>
> 1. reduction of total throughput in a combined-disk device relative to separate drive enclosures connected to their own USB ports
>
> 2. reduction of total throughput caused by the RAID mirroring process, even when it is done by dedicated hardware
>
> 3. linux compatibility
>
> 4. expense
>
> any experience and/or recommendations about doing this sort of thing would be most welcome! thanks in advance.
>
> cheers!
>
>

If you want to use hardware RAID. Make sure you get a real hardware raid, not one of those soft RAID controllers built into the BIOS jobs. They are worthless and actually slower the Linux software raid. (I set one up once and figured out what it was doing was creating a FAT partition on each drive, each containing a disk image file. Stuuuuuupid.)

Don't use USB or firewire raid units. *cough* Glyph *cough* It's like the kid next door that bolts a spoiler on his 1998 Grand Am. It's not going to make it any faster.

If you just want backup, a software raid 1 will do fine.

If you are looking for serious throughput with lots of tracks, consider a hardware SATA2 RAID 5 card (meaning that there is a hardware chip calculating the parity bits, and it has on onboard cache) If it's less that $100 it's probably not what you are looking for.

If you want a super fast RAID, use SSD drives.

If you want swappable drives, make sure you get a quality back-plane. I had a cheap one once that fried 4 motherboards before I figured out what was going on.

-Reuben
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Received on Wed May 5 04:15:01 2010