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Need advice on RAID 10

B

BG-Mac

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 31, 2007
276
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Alright so I've got my Mac Pro Quad 2.96 on order and want to get all of my Hard Drives ordered and ready to go once it arrives. My primary uses are going to be Photoshop CS4, Dreamweaver CS4, inDesign CS4, Aperture 2, Amateur Photography, and iTunes Storage/Serving.

How do you all feel about going with a RAID 10 setup? I would be using 4 1TB WD Blacks if I went this way. It seems like it would be nice and simple and protect me from a drive failure. I'm fairly new to RAID so I may be totally off in my assumptions. Thanks in advance for the advice.. :):apple:
 
Well first of all, doing an internal RAID-10 would occupy all 4 internal HDD bays (2 drives for the primary stripe, 2 drives for the mirror stripe). As a Photoshop user, you'll want to dedicate a totally separate volume to use a scratch disk for the best performance. You wouldn't be able to do this (at least internally) with a RAID-10 setup. In other words, your boot volume alone would be hogging 4 physical drives.

While having data redundancy is nice, it's still no substitute for a good backup strategy. Whatever you do on the primary stripe (add/move/delete) will be done to the mirrored stripe.
 
CaptainChunk said:
Well first of all, doing an internal RAID-10 would occupy all 4 internal HDD bays (2 drives for the primary stripe, 2 drives for the mirror stripe). As a Photoshop user, you'll want to dedicate a totally separate volume to use a scratch disk for the best performance. You wouldn't be able to do this (at least internally) with a RAID-10 setup. In other words, your boot volume alone would be hogging 4 physical drives.

While having data redundancy is nice, it's still no substitute for a good backup strategy. Whatever you do on the primary stripe (add/move/delete) will be done to the mirrored stripe.
Click to expand...

What would you suggest I'm open to pretty much anything? Thanks for the response.
 
Warrior09 said:
What would you suggest I'm open to pretty much anything? Thanks for the response.
Click to expand...

If there's a way to leverage the second optical drive connection and use that for a SSD to Boot from you'd have the ideal solution.

80GB Intel SSD for Boot drive and
RAID 10 WD Black drives for mass storage.

RAID 10 would give you good redundancy and good writes.

I'll search and see if this is plausible at all.

Here's some stuff

http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/IDE/SSD_in_Mac_Pro/SSD_install_in_MacPro.htm
 
There can be no thread on RAID without Mr. Nanofrog's thoughts...

However, I think he will likely point out that it's fairly old-school thinking to put scratch on a separate physical disk nowadays... the resource contention that practice was aimed to resolve just doesn't happen with modern systems and plenty of cache.

I think RAID10 is a great compromise of performance and up-time... and it's amazingly affordable.
 
The more I think about it the more a RAID 10 setup appeals to me. It would only cost me ~$400 for four WD 1TB Blacks and when I eventually run out of storage I can invest in a Drobo Pro, which I really want and more than likely will come down in price in the meantime.

Can someone educate me on setting up a RAID 10? Is it as simple as configuring bays 1/2 and bays 3/4 as RAID 0 and then setting up a RAID 1 between those two? Thanks a bunch guys!
 
If you decide to run a RAID, I'd suggest investing extra money into WD RE3s instead. They're essentially the enterprise versions of the Blacks and are built for 24/7 reliability, which is ideal for RAID. Drive reliability always goes down when you use them in RAID sets, so it's important to have drives designed to handle the additional stress.

I will also reiterate that it's not a wise idea to run your whole workstation on one volume, especially with applications like Photoshop.

I'm not intimately familiar with the new 2009 MPs, but I would think that you can re-route the unused (assuming you didn't order the machine with a second SuperDrive) ODD SATA port to a hard drive and make it bootable, at least in OS X. This would allow you to throw in a fast, apps-only boot drive (like a Velociraptor or an SSD) and dedicate the 4 internal HDD bays to your RAID-10. In your application, I think this might be the best case scenario.
 
Just a thought - you could set up 2 drives in RAID 0 for performance, then get an external and back it up with Time Machine. You get all the performance of RAID 10, you get the redundancy, and two empty drive bays in your MP.

Like I said, just a thought.
 
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