I’m going to start putting a new computer together today.
I bought two SSDs to put together a Raid system for my samples.
I have single SSDs set aside for both my audio and boot drives.
I’m wondering if I should use the Raid for my boot instead and have a single SSD for my sample drive.
Any informed opinions?
The problem with RAID0 is data gets split even on disks every 64k, meaning if 1 of the 2 drives dies you will lose all data on both disks. I wouldnt RAID at all for data speed increase and split sample library on two seperate drives.
Different story when working with huge files like uncompressed video, but personaly I wouldnt for audio.
What I did :
1 single 256Go SSD for my project files (Documents)
4 512Go SSD in raid 0 (stripping size : 128k) for my Os, my games and my Vsti samples and all is backup-ed on my NAS which is backup-ed on the fly on my unlimited amazon drive. (I also have 2 disks with all the installation files for all my softs and plugins). (I know that my SATA3 controller can’t handle speed but I like it that way, one big disk, 3 partitions : Os / Games / Libraries)
If one of my Raid 0 SSD crash I can get everything back within 2 hours by just re installing Windows with my Backupper image and copying back my Kontakt/spectrasonics/Nexus libraries. (approx 600Go)
So I would say, RAID O is good as long as you take it as a non secure option and if you get ready to have it fail at any time.
I wouldn"t use it for critical files unless you have realtime backup up.
I’ve been like these for years and I’m really happy with it (kontakt is lightning fast ^^)
That’s the thing using 4 SSD’s also makes the risk that something could go wrong 4 times more likely. In my experience SSD’s are a lot more robust than their spinning rust plate counterparts, but still a good backup plan I think would be essential.
I have a backup system for all of my hard drives. I recently bought the Spectrasonics Keyscape and load times are excruciatingly slow, let alone getting some bumps with the sample playback. That’s why i was leaning towards the RAD 0 system for the samples.
If you want to protect your data then use Raid1, this will give you mirrored Raid so if one drive goes down then all your data should be safe on the other drive. The drawback is that using 2x1GB drives for the Raid1 array still only has a total of 1GB. I think Raid0 is a little bit risky if your data is of any importance as one drive going down WILL lose all data on however many dirves are in that array.
But since my sample drive is backed up every evening I’m not concerned about that.
Is there any reason to think that an SSD raid makes any material difference. Surely it won’t be any (or much) faster than a SSD on it’s own?
With that cleared back to the original question, RAID the sample drive and not the boot drive.
I’m just wondering how big those samples are if they suck up an entire SSD’s bandwith (sata\pci?).
Are you sure it isnt a memory or buffersize issue?
I’ve got 32 gigs of memory and the samples i’m loading are nowhere near the capacity. The hard drive i’m using is a faster than average IDE drive. Perhaps it has issues.
Look first at how fast your storage channel can operate, most SATA3 channels can do 600 MB /sec, most SSD do 500MB p/sec, so with 4 SSD’s in theory can be 4 x faster when used with seperate diskcontrollers. However you do not have any control over whats gets to which disk, so when repairing youy should repair the whole volume not a single disk as you really can’t know whats on it. Hope this makes some sense to you.
IDE? Are you sure? Then you should definitely RAID those.
A single SATA3 SSD will have about double the bandwith of those IDE’s in RAID 250<>500MB read
Sample drives by definiton don’t change very often so having local RAID for them is an overkill. Buy a raid 1 NAS and set a daily sync to back any changes to the sample drive up to it. For my system drive I use macruim reflect (free) to take an image of it (to a ready to go disk) every time there’s a major change. My projects are also on my system drive, this gets backed up to the sample drive every night (and therefore copied to the NAS via the autosync process.)
just to give you an idea of 4SSD raid 0 perf :
Hello everyone.
This thread is quite old, but I would like to know if there are news related to this topic or more tests comparing SSD RAID configurations with independent SSD drives performances.
I recently purchased 4 NVMe SSDs for my iMac that are in an external Thunderbolt 3 enclosure (Netstor NA622TB3). My idea would be to use all 4 disks to create a single RAID 0 volume for orchestral libraries (Spitfire, East West, Vienna, Kontakt).
I know that configuring a RAID 0 with the 4 NVMe disks would improve reading speed, especially when loading large DAW projects (I’m using Logic Pro X) with many instrumental tracks (more than 400). But I do not know if it could cause any problem when reproducing the project, since the Raid would be created by software (MacOS) and I do not know if that could significantly consume processor resources when reading/playing a large amount of samples.
I’m not worried about security or drive failures, since I have another mechanical 8TB hard drive that I use as a backup of all my libraries.
I’ve read in many forums that users don’t recommend Raid configurations with SSD drives for music production/libraries. They argue that it is not necessary to create a RAID volume with SSD drives, since SSDs are very fast in themselves (in fact, NVMe are even faster). It’s also known that the access speed to the disk is more important than the reading rate for our musical purposes. But I don’t know if this is still the case or something has changed in the recent years.
Curiously, all NVMe external Thunderbolt enclosures that I have seen are designed precisely to configure Raid systems. One of the purposes because I would like to have all the libraries in the same RAID volume, beyond the performance, is because it allows me to have everything in a single volume and it’s more easy to configure all the software and also for easier cloning the drive for backup.
On the other hand, if the most advisable thing is to have the 4 NVMe drives independently, even losing approximately 50% of the reading speed, the backup system should also change and I could not simply clone a single volume.
So, is there any news about this? Thanks a lot.