Are you using a RAID? What for?

I am curious to learn more about everybody's drive configuration. How many drives do you have, internal, external? For external drives, what drives and what interface are you using? PATA, SATA, SATA II, SCSI, FW, Fibre Channel? Are you using a RAID configuration? RAID 0, RAID 1? Anyone RAID'ing their internal drives?

Software or hardware RAID? Which ones?

Where do your song files, audio files, system, and finally sample libraries live?

Thanks!

At work we are using a setup with 2 internal drives and 3 firewire drives. Here's some detailed info:

- Internal system drive 300Gb SATA, partioned to have different boot options and a backup system clone if we want to undo some updates

- Internal AV drive 300Gb SATA, the main project hard drive

- External AV drive 250Gb firewire, for samples and disk allocation

- External backup 1 250Gb firewire, mirror of AV internal

- External backup 2 250Gb firewire, mirror of AV external

At home I use a G5 with 2 internal and 2 external firewire drives. There's an internal system drive and an internal project drive both 300Gb. External firewire drives are used for backup and temporary storage. I have been thinking about an external 4 drive SATA box so that I could have one big raided disk for my projects. However making complete backups is getting harder and harder because the drives are getting so big...

Hey Hannes, thanks a lot for the answer. I visited your website... what do you guys do mostly? Music? Scoring?

External AV drive 250Gb firewire, for samples and disk allocation

Do you use large sample libraries? Don't you find the song loading slower when the sample libraries are on a FW drive?

Also.. I'm not sure what you mean by disk allocation?

Because we are a department of an university, most of the studio time is used for education and research. But we also do commercial projects in our studio if we don't have a lot of bookings for the courses. Students are also allowed to use the studio for their study related projects. But mainly music and sound related research. Haven't done any scoring (yet)...

The disk allocation is for Pro Tools. If we are using a lot of tracks on a session we'll usually divide them between AV internal and external with Pro Tools automatic disk allocation (round robin).

The largest sample library that we use is Synthogy's Ivory which uses about 35Gb for samples. And it is definately slower to load the samples from a firewire drive. We first tried to use Ivory from the project drive but when the track count goes up there are some problems with samples and we decided to use a dedicated drive for them.

I currently have two internal SATA drives in my G5 - both 250gb. One is the stock apple one, with 8mb cache (system drive), the other is the same make (maxtor) but with 16mb cache, i use this for samples etc.

I have a 200gb firewire backup drive (maxtor one touch), which also has a bootable partition on it, in case of emergencies, to test new updated, and also has stuff like developer etc installed on it... don't like having that on my music drive

I'm interested in raid, but have never made the move. I wish i could hold more internal drives in my G5...

Thanks guys.

Are you aware that you can actually stuff 4 drives inside a G5 with this solution? http://www.wiebetech.com/products/G5Jam.php

Thanks guys.

 

Are you aware that you can actually stuff 4 drives inside a G5 with this solution? http://www.wiebetech.com/products/G5Jam.php

Cool link! Have you checked out a real live system with that G5Jam installed?

Worried that it might not have as long a life as it otherwise could with the prospect of the new intel macs...also what's Dual Core ? isn't that just the regular dual 2 i'm already using? G5Jam site says it won't work with Dual Core and quad (dual Dual Core) processor computers.

I was interested in RAID when I originally bought my G5 but my dealer said it was more suited to big volume video users then what I was doing at the time.

Currently I have 160 & 250 GB internals and a 200 GB external FW

Peace

We where just gonna ask about Raids here,

We need to house 4x 300 GB drives which live inside a G4 450 dual that we want to replace, they are running on a ata PCI card., we need to actually house 8 all together, we prefer to simplify our rig and make it mobile.

Why so many drives?

We like to have our stock Audio/Video and sample libraries online, as well as all our Pro Tools and Logic Master sessions.

We decided on a Stardom 4 drive slot Firewire a or b instead of Sata since our drive rig will be external and mobile, this way we can run powerbooks with it as well as a G5.

Our question is if its worth the extra price for something more then what we are about to pay for the 2 Stardom "4X drive slot Raids" which is € 300 euros in Europe.

Please advise if anyone knows.

Thanks for any help

http://myspace-554.vo.llnwd.net/00685/45/53/685403554_m.gif

Hello,

I use several drive set-ups with a G5 dual 2GB - 6.5GB RAM:

For VSLVI - (2) 300GB Ultra SCSI Seagate 10K drives in a RAID 0

For Pro Tools HD - (1) 300GB Ultra SCSI Seagate 10K drive standalone (in same cabinet as above)

For VSL Pro Edition - (2) FW 800 250GB in RAID 0

For VSL VI backup - Wiebetech FW 400 dual chassis w/ (2) 320GB (Sometimes this bus gets used for guest drives)

For other samples - (1) FW 800 250GB standalone

Internal - SATA 200 Mac OS & SATA 250GB for Pro Tools backup

Don't really know how much that adds up to, but fortunately I have the drives & cpu in an adjoining room because of noise considerations. Now if my M-Audio keystation keyboard didn't make such loud clunking noises when the keys are being depressed I'd be able to hear the music I'm trying to make.

Best regards,

Jack

Peace

Drives seem to be a new problem these days, People are saying that Firewire 800 are the "way to go" externally for the speeds while yet SATA maybe the thing tomorrow and yet not if who knows what can come out these days.

But one thing for sure is everyone needs large drives if they want there samples online at all times like (example; NI samplers etc.) or even stock footage.

Been getting emails from different sites about prices dropping for 4 bay firewire enclosures, some range from 160 per enclosure to 230, These are Firewire 400a and 800b, some come with Firewire, USB and SATA!

We would love to house 8x 300GB drives in 2 4xbay enclosures so this would be fantastic if reasonably affordable.[/b]

Audio and Video Configuration :

 

Quad G5 2.5 Ghz, 8GB + 250 GB + 74 WD Raptor Mac OS X 10.4 + Motu PCI 424 E + 2048 MKII (24 outs )

 

G5 2x2 Ghz 3.5 GB MAC OS X 10.4

Raid 0 for the libraries made with Rocket Raid 1820A and 6 x 36 gb raptor 10 000 rmp

+ 160+250 GB + FW 800 Lacie + 2x24" DELL

 

Motu system including : PCI 424 + 24i + 2048 MKIII + 1296 (60 ins 12 outs)

Logic Control + 4 Logic Control XT

Midi interfaces : Stealth + OPCODE STUDIO 4 + MOTU MTP I ; USB EMAGICAMT 8 (48 ins/out)

 

Logic Pro 7.1 , QLSO Platinum, Atmosphere, Kontakt 2/VSL, Symphony Orchestra

Final Cut Pro

Sony Digital Camera

 

Synth :

Emu : Proteus 1, Proteus Vintage and Virtuoso 2000

Roland : S550, JV1080, D110, TD10

Alesis :Andromeda A6

Yamaha : P80, DX7, RX11, TG500

Korg : EX800

 

Drums : (Recording it with 11 mics)

Ludwig Long lugs 5 toms

Cymbals : Zildjian (6) + Meinl

Pedal and HH : DW

Gong + percussions (derburka...)

Roland TD6

 

Various :

Pre-amps : Presonus Digimax + Blue tube + Blue Tube DP

Set of 13 Mics (Rode,Senheiser,Shure,AKG)

Mixers : Yamaha Promix 01 and Frontier 24x8x2

I have set a raid of 6 Sata to put the QLSO Platinum lib, that has improved loading time a lot and was able to reduce K2' "preload buffer" to 48

I have run Xbench 1.1.3* on a G5 2x2 3 GB here are the marks given by Xbench on different configuration (higher is better)

86 with Lacie 160 GB FW800

97 with Lacie 200 GB FW800

103 with Lacie 250 GB FW800

109 with my internal Sata

122 with a Maxtor 250 GB

156 with Western Digital Raptor 36 GB

158 with a raid 0 of 2 Sata using Apple raid software

160 with a raid 0 of 2 Sata using Softraid

184 with the Rocket raid card in slot 3 and 4 Raptor 10 000 (with 1024 KB segments)

198 with the Rocket raid card in slot 3 and 4 Raptor 10 000 (with 64 KB segments)

205 with the Rocket raid card in slot 3 and 4 Raptor 10 000 with Softraid driver optimize for digital audio

227 with the Rocket raid card in slot 4 and 2 Raptor 10 000 with Softraid driver optimize for digital audio

237 with the Rocket raid card in slot 4 and 4 Raptor 10 000 with Softraid driver optimize for digital audio

268 with the Rocket raid card in slot 4 and 6 Raptor 10 000 with Softraid driver optimize for digital audio

Drives seem to be a new problem these days, People are saying that Firewire 800 are the "way to go" externally for the speeds while yet SATA maybe the thing tomorrow and yet not if who knows what can come out these days.

I would almost say that SATA 3.0 is today and Firewire is yesterday. And 10GbE is tomorrow. (10 times the speed of Gigabit Ethernet over fiber optic!)

Cyril, how do you like the Raptors? Are they noisy? Hot? Any problems?

I have lay my 6 raptors flat on a 2U tray with 2 small ventilators.

They are 7 ° more than the temperature of the room.

To start I have bought an SNT 3141, VERY BAD BOX, VERY NOISY, 53 dB ! the HELL. Before buying 2 SNT 3141 the manager of SNT have announced 35.5 DBA to me.

SNT has promised to fix that, I AM STILL WAITING SINCE October;

I AM VERY ANGRY WITH THIS COMPANY, THEY ARE BIG LYERS