When I Upgrade...
I was wanting to find out a few things that people suggest to musicians who will be utilizing their entire computer for music recording. I don't plan to do this now, for I don't have a powermac with insane memory and everything, but I do want to know a few things about what this guy is talking about:
1)So RAID systems can also be contained in computers? Using different drives for different things, but not in the company format that I would image (I imagine a giant tower like at my father's work that has 100 different drives... that's what I think of when I hear RAID, please correct me if wrong)
2)When he says "Setting up your start drive" and talks about the partitions, is that the things on the disk utility that reside underneath the larger drive at the top? (I have a powerbook, and just one partition - should I make one for my music to be recorded to? or to read the music program from?) What is the use for the 3rd partition he does, "OS X Service?"
3)"You can do a standard OS X "Panther"-Install on the OS X SERVICE and OS X BETA-partitions."
So you're telling me you can install different OS's on each partition? If you have a partition, MUST you install the OS, can it read from another (And use the partition as an organized storage "minidrive"?
4)Mainly, is there more info I should know about partitions?
5)I'd really like a lean, mean, powermac G5 (or whatever they have by the time I get it / need it) and use a laptop like I have now for all the average-joe stuff (like email, chat, and maybe a portable live recording setup), so would this be a great model to go after?
1)So RAID systems can also be contained in computers? Using different drives for different things, but not in the company format that I would image (I imagine a giant tower like at my father's work that has 100 different drives... that's what I think of when I hear RAID, please correct me if wrong)
2)When he says "Setting up your start drive" and talks about the partitions, is that the things on the disk utility that reside underneath the larger drive at the top? (I have a powerbook, and just one partition - should I make one for my music to be recorded to? or to read the music program from?) What is the use for the 3rd partition he does, "OS X Service?"
3)"You can do a standard OS X "Panther"-Install on the OS X SERVICE and OS X BETA-partitions."
So you're telling me you can install different OS's on each partition? If you have a partition, MUST you install the OS, can it read from another (And use the partition as an organized storage "minidrive"?
4)Mainly, is there more info I should know about partitions?
5)I'd really like a lean, mean, powermac G5 (or whatever they have by the time I get it / need it) and use a laptop like I have now for all the average-joe stuff (like email, chat, and maybe a portable live recording setup), so would this be a great model to go after?
Comments
The extra hard drive extender in computers on the cord just let you attach another hard disk, it will come up as a separate disk than the original one.
1) You only need 2 disks to create a RAID system, so they fit in computers.
2) You can choose to divide your disk into logical partitions, but I find that they are more annoying than useful. If you have specific performance issues, it may help, but most of the time it isn't needed.
3) You can install different OSes on different partitions, for your Mac to boot, it needs one installation of an OS.
4) Partitions can be annoying, as you have to copy files from one place to other, which takes time. And is only useful in very specific cases.
5) This is an excessive setup to go after, unless you're using Logic or whatever and really need that performance. Otherwise it is a waste of time and effort.
The following raid are the tree most commonly used in the PC/Network industry.
RAID 0. (Note that the term "RAID 0" is sometimes used to mean not only the conventional striping technique described here but also other "non-redundant" ways of setting up disk arrays. Sometimes it is (probably incorrectly) used just to describe a collection of disks that doesn't use redundancy.)
Technique(s) Used: Striping (without parity)
Description: The simplest RAID level, RAID 0 should really be called "AID", since it involves no redundancy. Files are broken into stripes of a size dictated by the user-defined stripe size of the array, and stripes are sent to each disk in the array. Giving up redundancy allows this RAID level the best overall performance characteristics of the single RAID levels, especially for its cost. For this reason, it is becoming increasingly popular by performance-seekers, especially in the lower end of the marketplace.
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RAID 1 is usually implemented as mirroring; a drive has its data duplicated on two different drives using either a hardware RAID controller or software (generally via the operating system). If either drive fails, the other continues to function as a single drive until the failed drive is replaced. Conceptually simple, RAID 1 is popular for those who require fault tolerance and don't need top-notch read performance. A variant of RAID 1 is duplexing, which duplicates the controller card as well as the drive, providing tolerance against failures of either a drive or a controller. It is much less commonly seen than straight mirroring.
RAID 5.
Technique(s) Used: Block-level striping with distributed parity.
Description: One of the most popular RAID levels, RAID 5 stripes both data and parity information across three or more drives. It is similar to RAID 4 except that it exchanges the dedicated parity drive for a distributed parity algorithm, writing data and parity blocks across all the drives in the array. This removes the "bottleneck" that the dedicated parity drive represents, improving write performance slightly and allowing somewhat better parallelism in a multiple-transaction environment, though the overhead necessary in dealing with the parity continues to bog down writes. Fault tolerance is maintained by ensuring that the parity information for any given block of data is placed on a drive separate from those used to store the data itself. The performance of a RAID 5 array can be "adjusted" by trying different stripe sizes until one is found that is well-matched to the application being used.
Let me know if this is the same in the MAC environment or different.
As for that article, almost all of it is unnecessary and won't help your performance at all. Aside from getting more memory and the fastest disks you can (which would help the performance of almost any application), nothing in that article should have any impact on the performance of Logic 7.
Originally posted by Thinine
Yes, RAID is RAID.
As for that article, almost all of it is unnecessary and won't help your performance at all. Aside from getting more memory and the fastest disks you can (which would help the performance of almost any application), nothing in that article should have any impact on the performance of Logic 7.
I understand. That I see.... but what a great way for organization! (Smartass, yes I know).
I am confused though, one says that mirroring drives with RAID provides the file stretched across another drive or two so that the read and write speeds are higher, then another person says this isn't true.
If it is/isn't, can you prove it? And which RAID number is this? RAID 1?
Can RAIDS be setup in the Drive Utility program? If yes/no, how are they connected? How do you think he is connecting them? What is the major cocern with deciding to use SATA or IDE connectors?
So RAID is making (majority) multiple disks think they are one. Does this mean that Partitioning is making a disk think it's multiple disks? If I were to partition something, and then go back and try and install something, and only had one drive, would it ask me to install on one of either drives? (Which was partitioned into two)
3 hdd 100gb = 300gb storage not in a raid configuration
1/3 of each drive is used for raid striping
therefore 300gb of total storage now becomes 210gb of total storage and 90gb is used for the striping
Raid is good for data storeage, I would say that the best way for audio editing would not be raid, in stead, concider 3 hdds, 1 for os and software, one to store audio and data, and a third for use as a scratch disk - a scratch disk is good to have even if you have a ton of ram, but if you have >1.5 gig of ram, it is not as important
The biggest secret to speed in a media envionment is defragmenting your drive, this is true at all levels, I have seen a defragmentation of data increase speed by ~25%
Originally posted by a_greer
A good explanation of RAID is here
Raid is good for data storeage, I would say that the best way for audio editing would not be raid, in stead, concider 3 hdds, 1 for os and software, one to store audio and data, and a third for use as a scratch disk - a scratch disk is good to have even if you have a ton of ram, but if you have >1.5 gig of ram, it is not as important
What do you mean by a scratch disk? Something to test stuff on?
I mean... Say I have my powerbook. It has a partition on it of Tiger which has all of the necessary stuff, along with the full install of Tiger. Then, Say I have another partition that has my music programs, music files -to-be-stored, and other music software that for some reason I want to run on Panther... Now could the two work together for that? Or is that a no-no?
I don't want to try. Just... wondering.
Also, if i wanted to defrag my hard drive, and I had DiskWarrior, would I still need to make a partition to run that DiskWarrior on, or would it do that and other disk information itself (like the install CD)?