jamesgig
06-12-08, 12:21 AM
I have been doing a lot of photo editing with a lot of batch work and will be editing hd video (hdv & achdv) this upcoming school year. I am having some sort of severe bottleneck which I believe to be my current HDD as my cpu and ram almost never peak out, but my HDD light is constantly on. As a solution I have been looking at raid arrays, but am not quite sure on the specifics for my application. Is this a logical conclusion?
Options:
WD 640gb 16mb cache x3 in raid 5=1280gb storage (100*3=$300)
Seagate 500gb 32mb cache x3 in raid 5=1000gb storage (90*3=$270)
same setups but x4 in raid 0+1 WD=$400 Seagate=$360
add a raid card?
areca ARC-1210 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card- $290 4slots
With whatever I decide, I will also be getting another 2gb of Ram. This is the system in my sig.
If I go with onboard, will I still be able to add a drive later without rebuilding?
Since my files start at 20mb and go up to 20gb or more, would I benefit more from the extra cache or from the denser platters? Obviously the extra space would not hurt, but it is not enough to outweigh the other considerations. I would like to keep it as inexpensive as possible, but do not want to sacrifice too much in performance and reliability. Which raid format would give me better performance?
Options:
WD 640gb 16mb cache x3 in raid 5=1280gb storage (100*3=$300)
Seagate 500gb 32mb cache x3 in raid 5=1000gb storage (90*3=$270)
same setups but x4 in raid 0+1 WD=$400 Seagate=$360
add a raid card?
areca ARC-1210 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card- $290 4slots
With whatever I decide, I will also be getting another 2gb of Ram. This is the system in my sig.
If I go with onboard, will I still be able to add a drive later without rebuilding?
Since my files start at 20mb and go up to 20gb or more, would I benefit more from the extra cache or from the denser platters? Obviously the extra space would not hurt, but it is not enough to outweigh the other considerations. I would like to keep it as inexpensive as possible, but do not want to sacrifice too much in performance and reliability. Which raid format would give me better performance?