A new Workhaus for a Music Production?

X-Trade · Post by **X-Trade** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 10:17 am

Of course, a backup is essential. The daily mirror job is a good idea. I always back up data to a portable hard drive.

But for half of your storage space you can be protected from 1 or even 2 storage failures.

I've built a few servers recently and RAID10 has become a kind of standard for that market, storage is relatively cheap compared to the redundancy that can be achieved. Plus four disks in a RAID10 is just as fast as 2 disks in a RAID0.

But there's a reason they call it RAID0. It's not really strictly speaking a RAID level, because by definition RAID provides redundancy. This is just a stripe across two disks.

Statistically, your data is at twice the risk on a stripe (RAID0) across two drives than it is on one drive on it's own. Any drive fails and you lose any of it.

I suppose if you are happy with the possibility that one day you will lose your entire day's worth of data and have the array completely unusable until you replace the drive, then that's fine. But normally RAID0 is only recommended for non-persistent data such as swap and cache. In some ways this is still better than SSD because of write endurance.

If your two RAID0 arrays are in the same enclosure and you mirror the data nightly, you might as well change it to a RAID10. There would be little to no performance impact but your redundant data would always be more up to date.
In fact on some array controllers you get an improvement in read speed too because the data can be read from any of the four disks.

If they are in separate enclosures or machines then fair enough.

BobTheDog · Post by **BobTheDog** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 11:51 am

They are in different enclosures.

Concerning speed, write performance of raid 10 is not good in my experience, and I do a lot of writing of large files. A Raid 10 over 4 disks will give only the same read performance as a raid 0, 1/2 the write performance and 1/2 the capacity.

I have not had a disk failure for at least 4 years but I did upgrade the disks once in that time. In the old days it used to happen all the time but they seem much more reliable now. (famous last words!)

Also important data (for me source code) is synced to remote source control many times a day as I am paranoid!

Each man to their own I suppose, it works for me.

chilly7 · Post by **chilly7** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 12:38 pm

BobTheDog wrote:D300 vid cards
512 flash
32GB ram
Thunderbolt raid 0 array, not sure which one, maybe the pegasus R4

I have a 30" cinema screen so I will use that.

I will advice u to get 1 tb flash!!!

because it is supper fest, and i do not think u can get 1 tb flash PCIe right now for that money. If i remember correctly1 tb flash PCIe was about 2500 dollars for regular PC

P.s.
http://www.amazon.com/OCZ-VeloDrive-PCI ... B004Z08SH8

Well actualy it is even more expansive right now, it is about 3500 now and used to be more then 5000!!!

BobTheDog · Post by **BobTheDog** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 1:04 pm

That is NAND storage though, I'm pretty sure that the MacPro memory is not NAND (I could be wrong though).

Also my current storage size is 12TB with about 7TB used, it won't fit!

chilly7 · Post by **chilly7** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 1:48 pm

BobTheDog wrote:That is NAND storage though, I'm pretty sure that the MacPro memory is not NAND (I could be wrong though).

Also my current storage size is 12TB with about 7TB used, it won't fit!

U can put all working elements on 1 tb flash and use the rest of ur ordinary harddrives as storage.
If all ur working elements will be on flash u can save time by not waiting loadings so u can do more work.

Bachus · Post by **Bachus** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 6:22 pm

chilly7 wrote:
BobTheDog wrote:That is NAND storage though, I'm pretty sure that the MacPro memory is not NAND (I could be wrong though).

Also my current storage size is 12TB with about 7TB used, it won't fit!
U can put all working elements on 1 tb flash and use the rest of ur ordinary harddrives as storage.
If all ur working elements will be on flash u can save time by not waiting loadings so u can do more work.

Clearly you lack basic hardware PC knowledge...
I can only advise you to stick to MAC, and never build your own Windows or Linux based PC

chilly7 · Post by **chilly7** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 7:20 pm

Bachus wrote:
chilly7 wrote:
BobTheDog wrote:That is NAND storage though, I'm pretty sure that the MacPro memory is not NAND (I could be wrong though).

Also my current storage size is 12TB with about 7TB used, it won't fit!
U can put all working elements on 1 tb flash and use the rest of ur ordinary harddrives as storage.
If all ur working elements will be on flash u can save time by not waiting loadings so u can do more work.
Clearly you lack basic hardware PC knowledge...
I can only advise you to stick to MAC, and never build your own Windows or Linux based PC

Can u please explain where i am wrong?

X-Trade · Post by **X-Trade** » Sat Dec 21, 2013 11:14 pm

Currently affordable flash ('solid state') drives ('SSDs') are under 512GB, usually 64 to 250.

You can get 1TB drives for about £700 each. Far too expensive for most of us, even those who make a habit of buying high end hardware or macs.

There are some cheaper 1TB drives sometimes mistakenly marketed as 'SSDs' or confusingly as 'SSHDs', these are hybrid drives where they will have somewhere around 8 or 16GB of flash drive as a cache to speed up loading and writing of commonly accessed hard disk areas. But the majority of the data is stored on a 1TB spinning disk drive at 5300 or 7200RPM. I have a 750gb version of one of these in my macbook pro. It performs quite well for a large storage drive.

Large disk drives traditionally have been considered slower than smaller ones. This doesn't really seem to apply much any more though.

Average throughput for a disk drive is about 200 - 350mbps
Some SSDs now max out at around 520mbps (you'd definitely need SATA III for this).

RAID0 array of two disk drives is going to give you approximately twice the throughput of one drive - so you already achieve speeds close to the better SSDs that way, and way faster than some other SSDs.

Apple has started shipping their macbooks (laptops, not towers) with SSDs, probably because of not just the speed but lack of moving parts makes them ideal for portable computing. The retina model for example only comes with SSD. That is actually one of several reasons why I did not get the retina model - the storage options were far too expensive.

chilly7 · Post by **chilly7** » Sun Dec 22, 2013 2:19 pm

X-Trade wrote:Currently affordable flash ('solid state') drives ('SSDs') are under 512GB, usually 64 to 250.

You can get 1TB drives for about £700 each. Far too expensive for most of us, even those who make a habit of buying high end hardware or macs.

There are some cheaper 1TB drives sometimes mistakenly marketed as 'SSDs' or confusingly as 'SSHDs', these are hybrid drives where they will have somewhere around 8 or 16GB of flash drive as a cache to speed up loading and writing of commonly accessed hard disk areas. But the majority of the data is stored on a 1TB spinning disk drive at 5300 or 7200RPM. I have a 750gb version of one of these in my macbook pro. It performs quite well for a large storage drive.

Large disk drives traditionally have been considered slower than smaller ones. This doesn't really seem to apply much any more though.

Average throughput for a disk drive is about 200 - 350mbps
Some SSDs now max out at around 520mbps (you'd definitely need SATA III for this).

RAID0 array of two disk drives is going to give you approximately twice the throughput of one drive - so you already achieve speeds close to the better SSDs that way, and way faster than some other SSDs.

Apple has started shipping their macbooks (laptops, not towers) with SSDs, probably because of not just the speed but lack of moving parts makes them ideal for portable computing. The retina model for example only comes with SSD. That is actually one of several reasons why I did not get the retina model - the storage options were far too expensive.

I am not expert in computer hardwear but Well actualy here another fackts to consider i have heared which are oposit what u seid:
1) 256gb flash from MacBook Air is fester then 128gb
2) 1TB from new Retina Macbook Pro is fester buy 1/4 from 512 GB

It was explained that bigger Apple flash has more lanes then smalle flashes so actualy bigger flash from Apple should be fester. But I am not shure if it is the same with all Apple products.

X-Trade · Post by **X-Trade** » Sun Dec 22, 2013 2:43 pm

Yes, I was talking about spinning disks. But as I said that is not necessarily true now either.

SSDs are faster in larger sizes because they tend to stripe it across multiple cells in parallel, much like a RAID0.

Still, 512GB and 1TB SSDs are pretty damn expensive.

chilly7 · Post by **chilly7** » Sun Dec 22, 2013 8:12 pm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyqtyVx_j_o
Looks like awrybody is on Christmas and New Year selebratin

Timo · Post by **Timo** » Sun Dec 22, 2013 11:23 pm

Far too many videos talking about what cardboard box it comes in and just jabbering on about nothing while it's sitting there in the background. Haven't seen one video where they plugged it in and used it.

Bachus · Post by **Bachus** » Sun Dec 22, 2013 11:38 pm

X-Trade wrote:Yes, I was talking about spinning disks. But as I said that is not necessarily true now either.

SSDs are faster in larger sizes because they tend to stripe it across multiple cells in parallel, much like a RAID0.

Still, 512GB and 1TB SSDs are pretty damn expensive.

The new samsung 840 evo, which is about as fat as it currently gets in SSD drivess costs 280 euro for 500GB... Quite acceptable.. And the 1 TB is only 480 euro...

Pricess for SSD drives are dropping rapidly.

Bachus · Post by **Bachus** » Sun Dec 22, 2013 11:42 pm

The biggest letdown for macs for live use as a VST host is the fact that OSX does not support touchscreens...

Windows 8 and vsts and a huge 27" touchscreen are a match made in heavens when performing live and having full controll over your ableton live or vsts on the screen...

Bachus · Post by **Bachus** » Sun Dec 22, 2013 11:44 pm

Bachus wrote:The biggest letdown for macs for live use as a VST host is the fact that OSX does not support touchscreens...

Windows 8 and vsts and a huge 27" touchscreen are a match made in heavens when performing live and having full controll over your ableton live or vsts on the screen...

Its all ost 2014, and having to use a mouse toclick on things while behind a keyboard is so much 2012 and before... Touchscreens work much more intuitive with vsts controll interfaces.