Do Pro Tools support RAID?

[Hak Heng]

does anyone know that Pro Tools support Raid or not? thank

[georgia]

Yes.... and no.

If you utilize an external hardware based RAID controller that makes a RAID set appear to the computer operating system as a single spindle, then yes... If you try to utilize software based RAID you will run into problems. Search the DUC for "DISK" "RAID" there are a number of detailed discussions on this topic...

cheers
geo

[Hak Heng]

Thank for your reply

I have do the search on Dididesign Website and I found that Pro Tools LE System doesn't support RAID, is it right?

Hak Heng

Best regards,

[The Chinese]

Thank for your reply

I have do the search on Dididesign Website and I found that Pro Tools LE System doesn't support RAID, is it right?

Hak Heng

Best regards,




Hak-
Digidesign does not officially support RAID arrays. However, some third party vendors have figured out how to make them work.

www.studionetworksolutions.com (http://www.studionetworksolutions.com)

-Todd A.

[Hak Heng]

Hello

Does Xserve RAID support Pro Tools?

[The Chinese]

Hello

Does Xserve RAID support Pro Tools?




Nope. Neither does XSAN.

-Todd A.

[sucker002]

My System is PT5 os9 TDM mix3 use G4 DP1.25.2G Ram.Two ATA Raid 133&100 Raid Ton of harddisk in 13 slots PCI exp.i got pci too busy sumtime if use lots of edit,efx etc.so i buy internt harddisk dun raid it for protool session wrk very good now..but my system harddisk is Raid no any problem.

[matmi]

I tested and implemented a fibre-channel storage solution for Green Movie Sound Department (www.greenmovie.com).
An Apple X-Serve RAID was configured to provide sound effect storage and audio/video recording/playback to three Apple G5 running Pro Tools HD3 Accel workstation (expanded with Avid Mojo).
1000 base-T ethernet was used to connect Macintosh and PC computers on LAN to enable fast cross-platform files sharing. It works great!
You can download the pdf file with the exact configuration from:

www.graphicalsound.com/docs/DigiXserveRAID.pdf (http://www.graphicalsound.com/docs/DigiXserveRAID.pdf)

Keep up the good work.

Matteo Milani
Sound editor
www.greenmovie.com (http://www.greenmovie.com)

[Jonathan Wales]

Let's be clear about the difference between fibre channel and raid. They are not the same.

Companies like SNS, Commandsoft etc. sell systems that enable SAN based file sharing over fibre channel with ProTools. These systems work very well and enable many people to simultaneously access the same files for playback.

As far as RAID goes, protools needs to interface very specifically with drives and expects them to behave a certain way. As a result, even hardware raid solutions will not always work. e.g. Xserve RAID will always throw up a DAE 9131 error if it is used with ProTools.

I believe there may be some solutions out there that are enabling other hardware raids to work with protools, but let's think about one fundamental of digital audio before we all get carried away with raid ideas...

Digital Audio playback (as distinct from digital VIDEO) relies on the software accessing hundreds of small files every second (like fade files etc.) This means that the limiting factor for performance of a drive is its seek time performance NOT its bulk transfer performance.

If you look at the seek time performance of a raid it is often inferior to that of a single spindle. Raid solutions are primarily designed for high transfer rates of data such as video where only a few files must transfer a lot of data. In audio very many files must transfer very little data. You can easily see the issue.

Even if you could use a raid with ProTools, you will not easily return higher track counts than you will with a 15k RPM single spindle.

FYI, the apple Xserve RAID can be made to work with protools in enhanced JBOD mode, where it makes each drive visible as a separate LUN to the outside world. However the write performance in this configuration is still inferior to that of individual spindles due to the shared nature of the write cache on Xserve RAID.