Any Benefit of RAID to Digi Workflow?

[JK_Photo]

Not sure if I'm posting this in the right place.

I'm looking for a new computer to run my digital darkroom.
Is there any benefit to getting a RAID setup?
Is RAID only useful on servers or could it speed up and smooth out the work flow when combined with a hyper-threading CPU?

Any photographer/computer gurus out there who can give me some good advice here would be appreciated. Having a heck of a time making a decision on what system to get.

[Sebastian]

You won't have any benefit from RAID 0 (striping), but mirroring is a nice way to prevent catastrophic hardware failure.

[JK_Photo]

Thanks for rplying.
Could you explain mirroring? Not sure what that is exactly.

Edit: OK I found out what it is, but how would you set it up?

[Sebastian]

Just google for it. There are many different types of RAID and I really don't feel like going into detail. Google will tell all...

[DownByFive]

Well, the main benefit of RAID is redundancy, which I suppose is good if you have a TON of workflow. Of course if you use RAID Level 0, you're pretty much wasting your time, because there is no real redundancy. RAID is a lot faster than just a standalone drive, but generally only when a lot of bandwidth is being used, which one person isn't likely to do. So for personal use, I don't know if you'd see a whole lot of improvement over like a fast P4 with a 10K SCSI hard drive, and a fast DVD-R for backups. I'm sure some might disagree with me though.

Not to say that I wouldn't mind having a dual 3.2ghz Xeon with four 15K SCSI hard drives in a RAID array sitting under my desk...

[JK_Photo]

Well, the main benefit of RAID is redundancy, which I suppose is good if you have a TON of workflow. Of course if you use RAID Level 0, you're pretty much wasting your time, because there is no real redundancy. RAID is a lot faster than just a standalone drive, but generally only when a lot of bandwidth is being used, which one person isn't likely to do. So for personal use, I don't know if you'd see a whole lot of improvement over like a fast P4 with a 10K SCSI hard drive, and a fast DVD-R for backups. I'm sure some might disagree with me though.

Not to say that I wouldn't mind having a dual 3.2ghz Xeon with four 15K SCSI hard drives in a RAID array sitting under my desk...

I think I'll melt down my grandmother's jewellry and get the second one you mention

Thanks for the advice.

[Trevor Ash]

Just a few comments from someone who made these decisions for multiple software development organizations....

1. You may get some benefit by way of speed increase if you use a striped array versus no raid at all. It's difficult to know for sure. I tend to agree with the other poster that said you probably wouldn't notice it. It's easy to assume that it'll be "twice as fast" but that's just not true. There's overhead and other issues to deal with and even the card used (software versus hardware implemented raid) makes a HUGE difference). The raid cards used in the servers are typically top notch hardware implementations that cost $500 to $2000. The raid that comes bult into many desktop PC's, although built into the motherboard, falls short of most expectations. I wish I could find some benchmarks I had a long time ago that showed speed gains from various manufacturers.

2. While a mirrored array setup doesn't buy you any potential speed, it does give you a little redundency. But it only helps for a hard drive failure....not the billions of other things that can go wrong. So whatever you do make sure you have multiple backups at appropriate time periods with at least one backup stored off-site. Raid is nice when you run a server and a hard drive breaks because then you can do whats called a "hot-swap" and replace the broken drive (and the raid bios automatically rebuilds the mirror!) without having to shutdown the server. THAT is the big benefit of mirrored raid.

My advice (subject to reversal pending details)......skip the raid entirely and spend your money on the best performing drives you can afford. If you have reason to believe that a striped raid will give you worthy speed benefit and you don't have any problems with the cost then go for it. But I think you'll have a hard time determining the actual benefit vs. dollars spent. Skip an other kind of raid you might read about.

[Trevor Ash]

BTW, I wouldn't mind seeing this thread moved over into Digital Imaging. I'm not sure this question has been asked before and I feel it fits that forum nicely.

[Arctirus]

I'm a network engineer and all around geek. I've been working with various raid setups for about 7 years. Software raid is totally useless unless you don't mind gaining some redundancy at the cost of a lot of performance; it's just a bad idea all around though. You should see a significant speed increase in going to a raid 0 (striping without parity) but I would not recommend this. If a drive dies or even losses connection all your data is gone (not that you shouldn't be doing regular backups anyway though. Personally I use a Promise TX2000 hardware raid controller ($80 from newegg.com http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduc...102-008&depa=0) and LOVE it. Ive got one mirror for my OS and one mirror for my data. Performance is fantastic and if a drive fails I can keep on working without a problem. The $500 to $2000 cards Trevor mentioned are SCSI raid cards for raid 5 arrays. If you plan on just using two drives many new motherboards have raid built on to the board itself.


Here's a pic of my raid setup:

[JK_Photo]

Thanks everyone for your excellent advice. It will make my future decision that much easier.

And thanks Arctirus for the close-up of your Ferrari's engine!