Gareth Allan

I am dealing with loads of video editing, preparing files for writing to dvd-r.

Current system is P4, 1.7GHz, 256Mb ddr ram, with a pioneer dvd-r a03 writer, 40gb hd (ata100,7200), and 20gb hard drive unknown spec, all ide. Two hard drives are paralleled on the ata100 slot, dvd writer on second ide slot.

I am continually creating disks that can be used as stand alone dvds, for presentations, data review etc, so create dvd-rs with several files just over 1Gb, or one image file at upto about 4.3Gb.

My current o/s is dual boot 98 and win 2000, with the drives split equally fat32/ntfs (ntfs required for single file over 4Gb)

My question is how can I improve the time it takes to move these large files about, using either my existing system, or by adding a raid pci card?

If i do add a raid card, can it also be used for the dvd writer?

And if i go to the bother/expense of changing things, will it give a noticeable improvement for say, moving a 1 gb file from one drive to another?

Gareth

Barnaby

One thing to keep in mind is that RAID (striped or RAID 5) speeds up reads but slows down writes. So moving files from one RAID pair of disks to another probably wouldn't be much better!

To improve both read and write you are into the territory of multiple disks with multiple controllers. This is something done quite a bit with SCSI, but I haven't heard of it being done much with IDE.

druddle

Talk to super_si about setting up stripes on IDE RAID !! He had a 2 way stripe and lost the lot possibly due to a disk. I would say if you are going to stripe, then mirror the stripes for fault tolerance.

Other than that RAID5 ideally needs 5 or 9 disks for best performance (quote from EMC) so it depends how many disks you have. If you have critical data you may want to look at mirroring too.

Dave

ChrisB

Striped RAID does speed up read AND write operations.

Gareth, have a read of this guide as it will clear up a lot of the terms used:

http://arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-1.html

chiark

...but raid 5 doesn't due to the parity overhead

ChrisB

Correct, Banarby was half right.

Gareth Allan

Data backup/realiability not really an issue, as everything is on dvd after worked on, so not a big problem if disk crashes. (mental note: backup all data tonight...)

Will check out the guide mentioned, thanks.

Gareth

ChrisB

I'd suggest something like...

A single HD (say 40GB 7200rpm) on the motherboard primary IDE controller. This will be for the OS boot, swap file and application.

Then a pair of 60/80GB (or whatever size you need) 7200rpm HDs as a RAID 0 stripe on a PCI IDE RAID Controller. I'd suggest 80GB drives as there's sub £10 between 60 and 80GB at present.

You'll have a massive quick 160GB partition for workin on and dumping the files into before burning.

Back up to DVD to avoid data loss if the stripe fails. The DVD remains on the second IDE channel on the motherboard.

Gareth Allan

Heading for raid 0, do the disks need to be he same type/size?

for instance, could I use the 20Gb drive I already have as primary, and then get one other 80Gb drive, and pair it with the 40Gb drive I already have? to give 120GB?

Gareth

ChrisB

You could carry on using the 20GB as the OS boot drive.

It's generally recommended to match the drives in the RAID 0 stripe, so same model, size, speed etc.

I've never tried running odd size drives in a RAID 0. Is it possible anyone?

Barnaby

Ooops! Of course striping increases write speed, bottleneck is reduced writing to two disks instead of one.

Sorry

STI MAN

If you're going to stripe two disks together for performance gains, and are worried about a single disk failure, look at it this way.

Forget that you *really* have 2 disks and just think of it as a singular entity. Simple!

Personally, I wouldn't bother with IDE RAID as it's not significantly faster, and IIRC IDE still does not multitask operations?