Atto dual channel RAID vs. separate drives w. Round Robin?

[maxx]

Any thoughts anyone?

Here's my setup:
G4 Dual 500 / 1GB RAM / 40 & 70 GB internal ATA drives / PT Mix Core w. 3 PCI farms / Atto UL3D dual channel SCSI w. two 36 GB Ultrastar ZX's (one on each SCSI channel - standard HFS) / Atto Express RAID 2.5 disc utility software.

I've dedicated the SCSI drives to audio (since going to PT 5.1 it now takes two drives to play back large sessions) while using the internal ATA drives for loop & sample storage and video playback.

My question is; am I better off using the SCSI drives in the standard fashion (as two individual volumes with Round Robin enabled) or would there be any additional performance benefit to formatting the two SCSI drives as a single (level 0) RAID volume?

From a houskeeping standpoint the RAID idea is attractive in that I wouldn't have to hunt through multiple audio / fade folders on separate volumes to access files. Is there any downside I'm not aware of?

Thanks all!

PS I'm aware that using RAID level 0 there is no redundancy and that individual files are written across both drives (if only one drive fails you're still S.O.L. whereas with two separate volumes you'd still have 1/2 your data). My question is more about increasing track count and record/playback initiation speed. As you all know the ATTO / G4 / Pro Tools combination is inherently flawed and doesn't allow us to fully realize true available SCSI throughput.

[ August 16, 2001: Message edited by: maxx ]

[ August 17, 2001: Message edited by: maxx ]

[ August 17, 2001: Message edited by: maxx ]

[maxx]

bump

[maxx]

no raid user out there???

[AINSLIE]

I tried doing RAID level 0 for a while. It did not improve my track count over top drives. It is great for video (single stream) but not much advantage for multistream so I have been told and found to be true. The problem is you and I are talking about software based RAID. To get true hardware RAID the drives are mounted in a seperate enclosure with seperate comtroller and appear to the mac as a single ID.

Anotherf problem in using RAID 0 over multiple drives is that if one drive fails, or is erased you have no hope of restoration.

I speak only from experience and memory of the research I did some time ago into this. FWIW - many users here report sucessfull 64 track working with a single drive. I do this with IDE drives. I agree that Round Robin is a pain for organisation.

[maxx]

Thanks AINSLIE,

That makes sense. FWIW, I easily got 64 tracks of 24 bit audio off either of my internal IDE drives as well - as long as there was not too much data on the drive. As things started filling up however, the performance diminished considerably. It's possible that this could be due to the fat that my IDE drives are formatted in HFS+ requiring them to work harder to locate any individual file. My understanding is that HFS+ allows allocation blocks 1/64th the size of standard HFS resulting in 64 times more "area" to search.

Anyway, thanks for the freedback.

-maxx

Cheers, -Maxx