Hi Everyone,
I have a RAID1 set up with two 1.5TB drives that I have been using strickly for Cubase audio files. Everything was working fine and all of a sudden it seems like Cubase is having trouble buffering the data from the disks and I get a drop out every 30 seconds or so. I have checked the health of the drives and the RAID which appear to be healthy. Has anyone else run into a similar issue? Maybe I just need a defrag. Any input would be greatly appreciated.
thanks,
Jim
The RAID health shouldn’t matter for pulling audio files. It’s only going to pull from one drive.
Defrag could help.
Hi Shinta215,
Right, I should have been clearer. I know that it only pulls from one drive but i’ve had issues in the past where if the computer blue screens once rebooted the disks will go into a “verify” state and it slows performance down. That does not appear to be the case this time around though. I will try the defrag. Hopefully it makes some improvement because this issue is driving me up a wall while i’m trying to mix. Thanks for your response.
Jim
Sorry but RAID1 can read from both disks for speed and if you have a drive limping, even if the array hasn’t outright failed, it’s going to cause problems. A single 48kHz 24-bit track (for instance) is less than 150k/sec so even with dozens of tracks it’s only reading a few megabytes a second; Even the most pathetically fragmented disks shouldn’t have much of a problem with this, so if it can’t keep up with that it suggests something larger is going on.
Try grabbing something like HD Speed from Steel Bytes and running a read test on the individual drives to see if one is dogging – unless your RAID is in hardware and only shows up as a single disk to the OS, in which case you can only test the aggregate which would at least tell you, in general, if the RAID is misbehaving.
RAID 1 doesn’t do data striping. It’s data mirroring.
No striping in RAID, no speed boost.
Essentially two hard drives and an automatic “copy” command.
Both drives in the mirror contain the same data. Unless you’ve got a very ancient or crappy RAID controller with a poor RAID1 implementation, it will absolutely read from both disks for speed. Even software-based mirroring in Windows will provide better read performance.
In RAID 1 (mirroring without parity or striping), data is written identically to two drives, thereby producing a “mirrored set”; at least two drives are required to constitute such an array. While more constituent drives may be employed, many implementations deal with a maximum of only two; of course, it might be possible to use such a limited level 1 RAID itself as a constituent of a level 1 RAID, effectively masking the limitation.[citation needed] The array continues to operate as long as at least one drive is functioning. With appropriate operating system support, there can be increased read performance, and only a minimal write performance reduction; implementing RAID 1 with a separate controller for each drive in order to perform simultaneous reads (and writes) is sometimes called multiplexing (or duplexing when there are only two drives).
Source Wikipedia.
Okay.
I was wrong.