mikester Posted March 15, 2006 Posted March 15, 2006 I'm thinking about adding a PCI-E RAID controller to setup a RAID 5 array for video editing. I read some reviews that said some motherboards have problems with these RAID controllers because their PCI-E support was designed mainly with graphics cards in mind. Does anyone know if I will have any problems using this RAID controller on my NF4 Ultra D? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16816115027 I'm already running my graphics card in the second slot because the V-1 cooler interfered with the HSF on the CPU. So when you move the jumper blocks, that sets both slots to run at 8x, right? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
red930 Posted March 15, 2006 Posted March 15, 2006 You might want to rethink your situation. Even with that particular card, you're gonna suffer bandwidth issues. You have to step up to something like an Areca ARC-1130 before you can get decent bandwidth and RAID-5 protection. link goodness... http://www.newegg.com/product/Product.asp?...N82E16816131005 Video editing requires lots of bandwidth between the drives and the motherboard. A RAID-0 array is just the thing for this situation. As far as archiving your data you would be better off with huge drives that you can duplicate the output files on for redundancy. I've built rigs both ways and the RAID-0 with offline storage is much cheaper and still faster. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
red930 Posted March 15, 2006 Posted March 15, 2006 So when you move the jumper blocks, that sets both slots to run at 8x, right? Yes, but you don't want to do that. Changing the jumper blocks to SLI disables the two other PCIe slots. Instead of the default 16 - 1 - 4 - 16, it becomes 8 - NC - NC - 8. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikester Posted March 15, 2006 Posted March 15, 2006 You might want to rethink your situation. Even with that particular card, you're gonna suffer bandwidth issues. You have to step up to something like an Areca ARC-1130 before you can get decent bandwidth and RAID-5 protection. link goodness... http://www.newegg.com/product/Product.asp?...N82E16816131005 Video editing requires lots of bandwidth between the drives and the motherboard. A RAID-0 array is just the thing for this situation. As far as archiving your data you would be better off with huge drives that you can duplicate the output files on for redundancy. I've built rigs both ways and the RAID-0 with offline storage is much cheaper and still faster. Thanks for the tip. I was worried about the bandwidth from a RAID 5 array. I was thinking it might be ok, because I mainly wanted to use the array as a catalog of all my video clips, so I can capture everything once and put all the DV tapes away and not have to mess with them anymore. So the array would be used for reads only 99% of the time. The actual editing - rendering new clips, MPEG compression, DVD generation, etc. - would be done on a single 250GB SATA drive I have set aside as a "scratch" drive for projects. Do you still think the RAID 5 array would be too slow in that situation? If so, I guess I can just go with a 3 drive RAID 0 array using the NVRAID controller like I had originally planned. Worst case, I have to recapture a bunch of video if a drive crashes, but it's not like I'm losing irreplaceable data. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
red930 Posted March 15, 2006 Posted March 15, 2006 Thanks for the tip. I was worried about the bandwidth from a RAID 5 array. I was thinking it might be ok, because I mainly wanted to use the array as a catalog of all my video clips, so I can capture everything once and put all the DV tapes away and not have to mess with them anymore. So the array would be used for reads only 99% of the time. The actual editing - rendering new clips, MPEG compression, DVD generation, etc. - would be done on a single 250GB SATA drive I have set aside as a "scratch" drive for projects. Do you still think the RAID 5 array would be too slow in that situation? If so, I guess I can just go with a 3 drive RAID 0 array using the NVRAID controller like I had originally planned. Worst case, I have to recapture a bunch of video if a drive crashes, but it's not like I'm losing irreplaceable data. In my opinion, the best bang for your buck is two Hitachi 80GB drives in RAID-0 if that gives you enough space for your work. If not, three or even four drives would do the trick. If you need a larger work space you might think about the WD 250GB drives with the 16MB cache. The SATA II drives are sweet because they can use the "rest periods" to read ahead on the drive then deliver the data from the cache at "burst" speed. I keep two or more copies of my valuable stuff on plain old PATA drives that I buy on sale from Office Depot or Staples. I recently got a 300GB Seagate drive from OfficeMax for $99.00USD. I use an external drive enclosure to populate them before putting them back in the Mylar bag for safe keeping. I like to buy drives in the 120GB to 160GB range for as little as $50.00USD on sale because they're just about the right size for a couple of volumes of work at the highest resolution. My rig Aileen keeps the processor pipeline full with just a two drive array. You may be able to take advantage of the bigger bandwidth with your X2 3800 so that's a good thing. I like to keep things as simple as possible so there's less to go wrong. Plus, I like to keep my costs down. Good luck! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikester Posted March 15, 2006 Posted March 15, 2006 Thanks for all the advice. I'm going for a little bit more storage than 2x80GB. I currently have 55 DV tapes full of video that I want to store online, at about 13 GB per tape. This past weekend I was at Fry's and they had 300GB Maxtor SATA 150 drives (at least that's what it said on the box) on sale for $99 - no rebate. I picked up 2 of them, and was pleasantly surprised to find that they were actually SATA2 drives with 16MB cache - these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16822144014 Some people were having problems with NF4 boards and needed a firmware update for the drives, but I haven't had any issues - must have got a newer batch or something. I get paid tomorrow and am going to run by there and pick up another one. That will give me 840GB total in that array, which should hold all my video and have room to grow. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
red930 Posted March 15, 2006 Posted March 15, 2006 Some people were having problems with NF4 boards and needed a firmware update for the drives, but I haven't had any issues - must have got a newer batch or something. I think it was the Maxline drives that had the firmware problem. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikester Posted March 15, 2006 Posted March 15, 2006 Ok, I'm definitely going with the 3x300GB RAID 0 array. Any suggestions on the best stripe size/cluster size combination for this array? I'm thinking a larger cluster size would be more efficient, since all the files will be very large. Not sure about the stripe size. Any tips? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts