adventures in RAID

[bigdude]

Hi all
I thought I'd post my adventures in RAID
I could use some help and I thought others could benefit as well

Motivation: Old IDE hard drive died so I bought some SATA drives and wanted to try RAID (yes, I understand that its not supported by DIGI)

Setup:
- asus p4c800-e deluxe
- 2 gb ram
- pIV 3.0 prescott
- HD accel with a process card
- protools 6.9
- xfx dual head dvi apg
- kworld xpert video capture pci card
- windows xp sp2
- 2 pioneer dvd drives
- 2 hitachi IDE hard drives
- 2 western digital SATA hard drives

Card order:
- AGP video
- EMPTY
- HD Core
- HD Accel
- HD Process
- PCI video capture

Bus config:
- primary IDE: 2 hard drives (master/slave)
- secondary IDE: 2 dvd drives (master/slave)
- promise SATA: 2 hard drives

Before buying the SATA drives, I ran the system IDE drive on the primary IDE port, DVD on secondary IDE port, and audio IDE drive on promise IDE port in non-RAID
I never had issues with this setup - it was problem free

So first try:
- move 2 IDE drives to primary IDE port
- move 2 dvd drives to secondary IDE port
- put SATA drives on ICH5R
Result: IDE drives are not available in boot order menu in bios :-(
I can't boot...no matter what changes I make in the bios for ICH5R
It seems that SATA drives on ICH5R somehow disable or hide the IDE ports for booting (???)
Anyone have this happen?

Second try:
- put SATA drives on Promise
Result: I can boot from the IDE drive no problem - yeah!
I go into the Promise Fasttrak utility and create RAID 0 array
After its done, it gives the error "fasttrak does not detect proper interrupts please check your irq pcisetup and make sure the pci slot support bus master operations"
WTF is that?
Its an integrated chip on the mobo....
Could it be a PCI card is not sharing an IRQ or something?
Look in mobo manual and slot 3 shares with SATA drives, could that be it?
There is the HD accel card in slot 3 currently
I continue booting into Windows and create NTFS volume on the RAID array
I run a test on all drives (IDE system, IDE, RAID) with HD Tach
All seems normal, RAID has an average of 20 points higher score than the IDE drives
Copy a typical Protools session on to the RAID drive
Start protools and once the session starts to load, it complains of something like "inacceptable audio drive for protools, do you want to copy the audio files to another location"
Never seen that before...

Any help appreciated
Thanks!

[bigdude]

UPDATE: Got the ICH5R RAID0 to work
After scouring the Asus forum, I found a few clues
I had to follow this procedure in exactly this fashion in order to get RAID0 to work and boot from IDE primary port (any deviation and I lose the IDE from the boot order menu)

- move SATA drives from Promise controller to ICH5R
- update bios to 1023
- in bios, disable ICH5R and Promise Raid
- reboot
- in bios, select proper boot order (floppy, dvd, IDE)
- reboot
- in bios, go to IDE configuration
- set 'onboard ide operate mode' to enhanced mode
- set 'enhanced support mode on' to SATA
- set 'configure SATA as RAID' to YES
- set 'Serial ATA Bootrom' to Enabled
- reboot

Then during boot, enter Intel RAID utility
Create RAID0 with 128k stripe
Reboot

Once in Windows, I created a basic disk and a new partition

I suspect that the protools error I got initially on the promise controller is due to the fact that I created a dynamic disk with volume instead of a basic disk with partition (oops)

Tonight I'll run HD Tach benchmark and try some protools sessions
I'll report back tomorrow
Thanks!

[bigdude]

Work day 1:

First - the error I got last night was "audio files are on volumes unsuitable for playback. would you like to copy them to a suitable volume?"
I thought this was related to the RAID config or controller
But I did a search on the digi answerbase for this and discovered that protools workspace window had this drive marked as transfer only
Changed it to record and there was no more error (hehehe my bad)

Ran HD Tach on the RAID0 drive off of the ICH5R
Nice results....almost twice the average speed of the IDE drives
Much better than the Promise RAID too

Loaded a protools session with about 80 audio tracks, all session files (including audio) is on the RAID0 drive
The session had enough RTAS plugs to have about 50% cpu utilization and enough TDM plugins to use about 70% of the TDM cards
Hit play on the transport....
Seemed fine
At one point, I did get one error message of something like "the audio cannot be retreived from the drive fast enough....defrag"
This occured while protools was playing and I switched to another application in the background to do something
But only happened once last night
The protools interface did *seem* slight more sluggish and slower than before but its been awhile since I worked on this session from the IDE drives so I can't be sure in my comparison

Given the load, it seems that the RAID0 might work ok
But given the HD Tach benchmark, those much higher benchmark numbers don't seem to translate to better performance for protools
Not seeing the benefit of striping of RAID0 with protools
But not any worse than off the IDE drive really

I'll work on this setup for a couple of days and see how it goes
After that, I plan on trying RAID1 on the ICH5R
That redundant config is actually more interesting to me so that I have a copy of the protools data
After that, I'll try just SATA no RAID
Then I'll make a decision as to which to stick with

I'll report more as I have it
Thanks!

[bigdude]

I've been working on the RAID0 setup now for a couple of weeks
Honestly it seems fine
I have not run into any errors except for the first day (probably transient)
I run a handful of other applications in addition to protools and no issues
It would be hard to justify spending the extra cash on a RAID0 system though
Even my biggest session played ok off the IDE drive

This weekend I'll probably convert the array over to RAID 1
If the protools sessions work as well off the mirrored RAID setup as the IDE drive, I can see a huge advantage there
I'll report back after the conversion
Thanks!

[bigdude]

Hi all
So its been almost a month that I've been using the RAID1 (disk mirroring) on the Intel controller for my Protools sessions.
No issues whatsoever.
The HDTach benchmark for RAID1 was not as good as RAID0 but clearly better than NON-RAID IDE.
So I'll be staying on this setup and have my Protools session drive mirrored
Thus my Adventures in RAID come to an end
Hope all this helps or is at least informative to someone
Cheers