[s-cars] NAC- need advice on photo workstation, RAID and some other ???s

[Taka Mizutani]

Kurt-
Comments within, thanks for the reply.....

On 6/13/06, Kurt <szarka77 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> 1. Go with Seagate HD's.  They have a 5 year warranty, others don't.
> Don't mix brands.


Why not mix brands? Is it really bad to mix drives in a RAID array?

2. Want real throughput speed? Don't go SATA at all, go U320 SCSI with
> a HARDWARE controller--adaptec, Intel, etc.  Don't believe the specs
> that say SATA is just as fast--it isn't.


The reality is that I cannot afford U320 or SAS. I'm still going with a real
hardware
RAID controller, though. The other limitation is that because I'm running a
PCI-E MB, I don't have the option of PCI-X cards which are much cheaper
(probably because of much higher volume of cards sold) and have a much
larger selection.



3. EIDE/SATA HD's die all the time.  I know because I am frequently
> tasked with trying to recover them.  SCSI drives die much less
> frequently.  If money is no object go with hot-swappable U320 drives
> in a cage.  If one goes bad, you just plug in a new unit and it
> automatically rebuilds itself on the fly. (Assuming you buy a
> controller that supports that feature $$)


When you say SATA drives die all the time, in what kind of environment are
you talking about? I'm not running this like a server, on 24/7, so unless
you see a majorly high failure rate on light use workstations,  I'm not all
that worried. The consensus on a bunch of forums (FWIW) is that WD3200
series SATA drives are pretty good.

The controllers I'm looking at support hot swap, hot rebuild, etc. I did
take this into account.

3. If you go with SATA, DO NOT under any circumstances use WD's so
> called "Raid Edition" (RE) SATA hard drives.  EVERY ONE of them that
> my company has installed in servers had died/become corrupted.  (We
> build servers, among other things) We've stopped using Maxtor and WD
> altogether.  They fail too often.


Thanks for the heads up, I heard some bad stuff about the RE drives.

5. FORGET tape for backup.  Too little capacity, too little
> reliability, too slow, too expensive. Go with external USB 2.0 drives
> as the other guys have suggested.  You can run any commercial grade
> backup soft on a schedule so you won't have to worry about "doing it
> manually."


I never really thought about tape because of the speed, cost and I don't
think tape is
as reliable as an external drive.

In actually practice you will "feel" very little difference when
> opening/manipulating average sized files whether you use U320 SCSI or
> just a single 7200 RPM SATA drive.  If you were doing video editing
> with a product like Adobe Premiere and handling 50-100gb video files
> routinely, then you would actually notice the speed difference with a
> U320 drive vice EIDE/SATA.  Doing what you are describing, I really
> don't think you will.  If you can, place your swap file (pagefile.sys)
> on an LUN other than the boot drive/array--better throughput.  You
> might want to make it a fixed size, too.  Do not use real time
> antivirus scanning when yuo are working with large files and need
> maximum speed.  Turn things like NAV's "auto-protect" feature off.


Well, I'm not editing video, but 20-30MB Photoshop files are still a major
resource hog. I'm planning on having a dedicated scratch disk for Photoshop,
separate from the array. The OS and apps will reside on a separate drive,
the array is for data storage only.

Thanks again, Kurt.

Taka