SATA RAID question

[saggitarius]

If anyone knows....................

I want to setup a RAID 0 on my system for video capture. I know my board supports SATA 150, but not SATA 300 (or SATA2) I bought a single SATA drive about a year and a half ago, and am now financially capable of adding a second one, but I was informed that since the drive is that old, I will have some problems trying to match it.

My question is, DO I HAVE TO MATCH IT EXACTLY? Or will the RAID array only be as fast as my slowest drive? I have a Maxtor 6y160mo drive with 8m cache, apparently the store that I normally deal with cannot get this type of drive anymore, only ones with the 16m cache. So either I need two new drives and the old one will have to go somewhere else, or I can do this anyhow but with a slighly crippled array?

Thanks

[redwudz]

RAID 0 may work with dissimilar disks OK, but it would work much better with matched drives. There is also a JOBD RAID type (Just a Bunch of Disks) that may be a better option, if your controller has this capability. If neither works, just use the drives independently with no RAID.

I gave up on RAID some time ago for video capturing. A modern SATA drive works well enough. RAID 0 improves access time mostly and if one disk fails, all data will be lost.

[doppletwo]

ATA100 is fine for video capture.


SATA150 is already overkill.

[rallynavvie]

Yeah there's no need for RAID for capture, in fact you're better off using the drives seperately once it comes down to encoding and such. And you're really rolling the dice if you use drives that don't have the exact same model number in your single-level RAID arrays.

There aren't any uses for striping on the consumer level IMO. And even when there is a need for it simple RAID 0 is a laughable endeavor when compared to proper nested arrays. It's basically just hype and marketing these days. Way back when there were bottlenecks on the IDE/PCI bus RAID may have been useful but not so much with hardware lately. And most of those folks, and I'm sure we'll see some post here shortly, will tell you all about how their computer is so much faster with RAID 0 than without. I had it for a while on my last rig and never really noticed it at all, and that was using two 15k SCSI drives.

[rkr1958]

I was running Raid0 using a pair of 160-GB SATA150 drives a while back. They were fast but like doppletwo said above, SATA150 is more than enough for video capture. After running Raid0 for a while I decide to reconfigure my two drives as individual 160-GB data / capture drives. To tell you the truth I really didn't notice the difference in terms of speed. However, a year or so ago I did have a drive fail when in a Raid0 configuration ... I lost all data on both drives ... nothing that I couldn't get back ... it just took time ...

Again ... I agree that Raid0 for home use is hype ...

[edDV]

If you only have two drives, almost any "video" task will benefit from separate OS and capture drives. The idea is to let the OS play in its space and let capture or large file streaming apps have a separate disk controller and HDD operating independently on the PCI bus in bus master mode. This keeps the OS from taking over the HDD while capturing which can happen with a single drive or under a game style single RAID 0 setups.

A third and forth drive could be added to the capture side under a RAID 0 arrangement if you think you you need the bitrate, but this is rarely needed even for single stream uncompressed 4:2:2 YUV capture or playback. Lossless huffyuv can easily work on a single ATA-133 capture drive, compressing with current CPUs.

You only need RAID for multi-stream "realtime" SDI cards but motherboard RAID controllers aren't up to that task. You need a specialized PCI RAID controller.