RAID Controller recommendations for video editing

[BrickfulIan]

Hey Forum!

 

I am considering adding a Silverstone FS305 (5x3.5" Linus used in NAS/gamingpc build) to my workstation with a bunch of WD Blacks for video editing. I want to have four of the drives in either a RAID 5 or a RAID 6 setup and the fifth drive as a hot swappable drive for archiving projects to 3.5" HDDs.

 

Should I be using a pci-e RAID Controller for this type of setup? Recommendations on RAID Controllers? Or is software raid good enough?

 

System specifications at the bottom of the post.

 

Many Thanks,

Ian

BrickfulIan

 

System specifications

MB: ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ATX LGA1155

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz Quad Core

Storage:

     Samsung 840 EVO 1TB

     Seagate ST4000VN000 4TB

     WD Black 4TB

RAM: 4x8GB G.Skill Ares Series DDR3-1600 Memory

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX770 2GB

Sound: Asus Xonar DSX 24-bit 192 KHz

Case: Raidmax Vampire ATX Full Tower

Wireless: Intel 9260HMWDTX1 802.11ac

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate, though considering upgrading to Windows 10

[Codymm03]

software raid.

[braneopbru]

Hey Forum!

 

I am considering adding a Silverstone FS305 (5x3.5" Linus used in NAS/gamingpc build) to my workstation with a bunch of WD Blacks for video editing. I want to have four of the drives in either a RAID 5 or a RAID 6 setup and the fifth drive as a hot swappable drive for archiving projects to 3.5" HDDs.

 

Should I be using a pci-e RAID Controller for this type of setup? Recommendations on RAID Controllers? Or is software raid good enough?

 

System specifications at the bottom of the post.

 

Many Thanks,

Ian

BrickfulIan

 

System specifications

MB: ASRock Z77 Extreme4 ATX LGA1155

CPU: Intel Core i7-3770K 3.5GHz Quad Core

Storage:

     Samsung 840 EVO 1TB

     Seagate ST4000VN000 4TB

     WD Black 4TB

RAM: 4x8GB G.Skill Ares Series DDR3-1600 Memory

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX770 2GB

Sound: Asus Xonar DSX 24-bit 192 KHz

Case: Raidmax Vampire ATX Full Tower

Wireless: Intel 9260HMWDTX1 802.11ac

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate, though considering upgrading to Windows 10

 

If you're doing video work, you're going to be after speed - ideally you would be using SSDs but with the massive size of very high resolution video, using SSDs becomes prohibitively expensive. So to achieve similar speeds, the best option would be RAID0. If you did, for example, 4x 1TB WD Blacks, you'd be getting around 600 MB/s sequentials on 4TB of total storage. You could then stick a single 4TB drive in the fifth bay and use folder syncing to manually copy the contents of the complete RAID array to that drive. If you do a nightly sync, at worst you could lose a days' work. If you were to have a drive in the array fail, you could simply replace it, build a new array and just copy the contents of the 4TB back to the new array to continue working. 

 

You're not after crazy amounts of redundancy anyway, since as somebody who's data is a source of income, you have multiple backups of both the raw video and your finished projects, right?.......RIGHT??  

[BrickfulIan]

I am personally a fan of software RAID as It reduces the complexity of the RAID array by taking out another hardware layer. However that being said I would first try to build a NAS instead of running a RAID card because noy you don't have to have a bunch of HDDs sitting in your computer. If you are dead set on buying a RAID card I would get a card from LSI. They make good stuff. Also If you go with a software raid RAID 5 arrays actually do take a significant performance hit on your CPU because now the parity-data must be calculated on the CPU instead of the RAID card. Basically what I am saying is try to build a NAS and if you can't for whatever reason, prepare to shell out hundreds (or even thousands) for a good RAID card.

Is there a particular NAS brand you would recommend? At my current technical knowledge level I'm not sure I want to be experimenting by building a NAS I would use for my work.

 

Thanks for replying so quickly!

 

Ian

[leadeater]

@BrickfulIan In the Windows space you really wouldn't want to use software RAID 5 or 6, performance is terrible. Have a look in to Windows Storage Spaces mirror setups online, a 4 disk pool would work well.

 

If you want to go down the off the shelf NAS route my personal picks are a tad on the expensive end of the brand choices, QNAP and Synology I highly recommend. On the cheaper end I'm fairly sure Western Digital NAS's should be good quality.

 

You can also build your own mini ITX NAS yourself using these types of cases to get similar size offering if size is of concern. http://www.norcotek.com/product-category/media-center-cases/storage-mini-itx-case/