SATA Raid

[lismore dan]

Hi,Ive been browsing for awhile and I havent seen much about the raid issue. My system is used for graphics and DV video as well as audio and at times the system slows unacceptably. My mobo has SATA raid built in and with the price of wd raptors so cheap I decided this is probably the cheapest upgrade for the DV and graphics. What I cant seem to work out is will tools work if I use the raid setup as the boot drive. I cant understand how if Windows will see them as one drive and there is no software running the array what difference does it make to Tools. Has anyone had any experience?

Setup:

AMD Athlon XP 2800 Barton
GV-7VT600-P-L VIA KT600 (SATA RAID on VT8237 southbridge)
Seagate 7200 120G 8m
2x WD Raptors 36g (comming)
Digidesign 001
Windows XP Pro sp1
Pro tools LE 6.4
Photoshop cs
Premiere pro 1.5
Illustrator cs
Indesign cs

[mkosacek]

I've also seen various threads saysing "RAID is not supported by Digi". As someone who works with high end RAID disk products nearly every day, I can tell you that in most cases, RAID is transparent to the operating system (and especially applications). The only exceptions are if you are trying to do software RAID, which uses the host CPU to do the striping and/or parity algorithms, or maybe if you have a poorly designed driver or hardware. I would not recommend doing this at all. But if your hardware RAID controller either has a (reliable) battery protected write cache or uses write-through, then it should work great. Keep in mind that when you are writing audio files, RAID5 (striping w/parity) has additional overhead (some RAID controllers more than others depending on the algorithm used) that may actually decrease performance. Sometimes, write-back cache can mask this effect. RAID 1 (a mirror) can offer good redundancy and sometimes increase performance (on playback). There is also some additional overhead (less than Raid5) but it is typically neglible. I know several folks that are using hardware-based RAID1 (mirrors) with SATA drives and its working just fine.

[lismore dan]

(Follow up) Just to let any one interested know, Ive been using the raid setup as Ive described for the last few weeks without a problem. Tools doesnt seem any different, but the operating system is way sweeter.
Just to recap this is on-board SATA Raid0, Xp See's one drive as does any software. interestingly I partitioned these raptors into half system and half Data (2x 36 gig drives in Raid0 = about a 70 gig drive) When Tools reads the audio on the data drive there is no problem as well.
Maybe DUC admin should do their own research into this.

Setup:

AMD Athlon XP 2800 Barton
GV-7VT600-P-L VIA KT600 (SATA RAID on VT8237 southbridge)
Seagate 7200 120G 8m
2x WD Raptors 36g
1.5 gig 3200 ram
Digidesign 001
Windows XP Pro sp1
Pro tools LE 6.4
Photoshop cs
Premiere pro 1.5
Illustrator cs
Indesign cs