10000RPM Drives + RAID0... will it improve things?

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What brand of HDD have you had the least trouble with?

Poll ended at Mon Dec 09, 2013 2:15 pm

Seagate
3
100%
Western Digital
0
No votes
IBM
0
No votes
Toshiba
0
No votes
Fujitsu
0
No votes
Hitachi
0
No votes
 
Total votes: 3

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alexdingley
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10000RPM Drives + RAID0... will it improve things?

Post by alexdingley » Tue Sep 10, 2013 3:15 pm

Hey there,

I'm looking to speed things up a bit on my machine... not that it's slow now, but I noticed that I have an extra HD bay in my tower and currently 1 10000RPM drive in there.

If I were to RAID-0 two identical 10000RPM drives, would it be a tremendous boost in responsiveness on tracking & playback?

Anyone else doing this?

I'd be putting them into a Mac Pro 2009 which is just SATA II, so I'd only be getting a 1.5GB connection, even though the drives are 3.0GB compatible... but still, I imagine that it might give a nice boost in performance.

That's all... just looking to goose up the recording deck a bit since I don't plan on replacing it with a shiny-new black cylinder any time soon.

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Snarl 12/8
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Post by Snarl 12/8 » Tue Sep 10, 2013 4:06 pm

Are you disk bound now? Can you run some sort of "performance monitor" (it's been years since I've used a mac) while you track something? See what pegs "100%" first. If it's your disk, then, yeah, maybe it'll help. If it's your CPU or RAM then maybe not. How much RAM do you have? Usually that's the bang for your buck performance boost option in most systems, unless you have a specific problem somewhere else. Also, how much cache does your 10,000 rpm drive have. I recently went from a drive with 8megs cache to one with 64megs an it made a huge difference (I think, it's a different brand drive, but they're both 7200 rpm, 1TB.)

Lastly, what about sticking an SSD in that spare bay for OS and apps?! There's your performance boost right there.
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Post by dfuruta » Tue Sep 10, 2013 4:23 pm

Seems unlikely that the hard drive rotation speed would be the limiting factor in daw performance, but I suppose one never knows

Never have found it to be, myself

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Post by The Scum » Tue Sep 10, 2013 6:08 pm

It's been 10 years since I had any DAW issues that were definitively traceable to disk speed. Multitrack audio is pretty low-bandwidth by today's standards.

If it ain't broke, there's nothing to fix.

Put the $100 in the black cylinder fund, for when that day comes.
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alexdingley
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Thanks for the input

Post by alexdingley » Wed Sep 11, 2013 6:02 am

Sounds like I probably don't need to do this... Like I said, I was trying to deck-out my machine a little better. I've got 10GB of RAM now, and the machine performs great.

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Post by Electricide » Sat Sep 14, 2013 6:33 pm

the 64 MB cache velociraptors are pretty cheap these days. Assuming you're thinking a 64 GB or 128GB.

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calaverasgrandes
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Post by calaverasgrandes » Mon Jan 27, 2014 3:53 pm

cached data is not the same as continuous data streams that DAWs need.
I've found that you actually get higher track counts and more stable sessions with disk caching disabled.
Contemporary drives are so data dense that even a 5400 rpm drive is moving its 500gb past the drive head much faster than yesteryears 80gb 7200rpm.
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Post by joel hamilton » Tue Mar 11, 2014 11:23 am

The high rotational speeds have always led to higher failure rates for me.
I have been using enterprise grade drives for the system and I also have my own server setup at the studio that is backing up the whole facility every hour and on a 24 hour schedule to multiple drobos with enterprise grade drives in them. It is on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. My protools rig is on almost every single day of the year as well, at LEAST 12 hours a day.
The system drive and our internal work drives are enterprise grade. Read the specs for bad block recovery and performance testing... they really are something I have come to trust, as much as I trust a hard drive that spins all day long.

There are usually performance gains to be had elsewhere in the system, but for overall reliability and consistent behavior, I trust the toshiba enterprise grade drives., like in my trusty apple XSERVES and protools rigs.

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alexdingley
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enterprise drives

Post by alexdingley » Wed Mar 12, 2014 4:54 am

Joel,

Thanks for the input! that helps a lot. Currently 3 out of the 4 spinning drives I have in the system are enterprise class drives. My boot/apps drive is an OCZ Vertex 4 512GB SSD, and the tower boots/runs really fast.

My drobo is full of WD Greens, but then again... it's a drobo, so when a drive fails (so far, one every 2.5yrs on average) it's no biggie... i just swap one out with a bigger drive.

I'll look into the Toshiba's when I get my next drive.

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alexdingley
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Drives

Post by alexdingley » Thu May 01, 2014 8:23 pm

Just a note... I ended up getting a great deal on 2 7200rpm enterprise drives and I set them up as a striped RAID in my tower. I'm getting tremendous performance. My single 10k drive was pushing 120mb/s and this RAID is getting 360+ mb/s it's tracking / punching / editing 192Khz sessions (24+ tracks) without breaking a sweat. Gonna track a project in June at 192 across the board, and I can't wait to see how it goes.

<pushes>

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