RAID 0 of limited or no benefit using FW800??

[Luba]

Just bought G-Tech's portable G RAID mini for video editing on Final Cut Pro. I can set it up as RAID 1 with the 2 500GB 7200rpm HDDs or stripe them in RAID 1 for 1 TB. I will using FireWire 800. Would striping/RAID 1 them be of any speed benefit when I am using FireWire 800? Would FireWire 800 be too much of a bottleneck to notice any benefit of RAID 1? If no benefit or of limited benefit, I would set it up as RAID 0 instead.

I was also thinking of getting an eSATA card for my MP to speed things, but I'll be taking this portable external here and there to edit, and almost everybody I know doesn't have eSATA on their Macs. If you know of a good eSATA card to look into, please do tell. I read some eSATA cards don't work well.

 

[Ryan P]

I've got the 4TB G-Raid and the 1TB G-Raid Mini.

You would probably have to test it to be sure. Firewire 800 is good for about 80ishMB/sec. I know the Mini gets about 120 MB/sec in RAID 0 eSATA....so you might loose a small bit of performance going to RAID 1 Firewire...say 80MB...to 60MB....just guessing.

So small performance loss, significant reliability gain, and loose half the space. By the way I'm planning on testing out this eSata card but have not yet

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/MXPCIE6GS2/

 

[Luba]

Wrote the above incorrectly (RAID 0 = striping, RAID 1 = redundancy):

Just bought G-Tech's portable G RAID mini for video editing on Final Cut Pro. I can set it up as RAID 1 with the 2 500GB 7200rpm HDDs or stripe them in RAID 0 for 1 TB. I will using FireWire 800. Would striping/RAID 0 them be of any speed benefit when I am using FireWire 800? Would FireWire 800 be too much of a bottleneck to notice any benefit of RAID 0? If no benefit or of limited benefit, I would set it up as RAID 1/redundancy instead.

The G Tech RAID mini has an Oxford 936 chipset, is that the hardware controller? I heard with a hardware controller, I would see a speed benefit with RAID1 in reading but not writing. Then again, I read that Oxford 936 is not really a hardware controller (courtesy of nanofrog), but is it a good enough hardware device to improve the reading speed in RAID 1? Would I lose any writing speed in RAID 1?

 

[toxic]

I think your drives by themselves can saturate FW800, so RAID0 won't help much.

 

[Honumaui]

the only thing it might help with a bit is when the HDD fill up if you start putting more than %60 on them the speed will maintain a bit quicker ? thats about it

I still say dont go over %60 if you can for data no matter what ? boot never more than %50 and better to be even lower like %25 but SSD I say go ahead to %50 for boot ?

 

[philipma1957]

I think your drives by themselves can saturate FW800, so RAID0 won't help much.

I have done a lot of testing with raid0 and firewire 800. It is faster then raid1 and firewire 800. I have tested 10 or 12 raid0 setups with my mac mini and raid0 /fw800 .


I have done a few with my mac mini and my esata hack faster with better scores. here is a link to a lot of raid0 tests i did. not every test is mine but you can see differences between raid0 and raid1 with fw800 in a lot of the tests on the link


http://db.xbench.com/search.xhtml?text=zzzz