Questions about RAID 5 and compatible RAM

[Andersonjoe711]

The Intellistation in my sig has 4 spots for hard drives. I want to max out my hard drive space, and fit the 4 biggest drives my motherboard will hold.

My trusted computer salesman has reccommended that I set up a RAID 5. this will create one hard drive out of the 4 (am I right?) and enable me to replace a drive if it fails, and not lose my data.

Is this a better solution than having 4 separate drives?

are there any other solutions out there?

is my M-Pro RAID 5 capable?

Sorry, lots of questions, and thank you in advance for the answers


One more thing. Is this a good deal : 4 sticks of 1GB RAM (Paired) for roughly $100 each? I think they're the PC2800 or they're the 3200, I don't remember. Is that a good price, and is it worth it to max out the RAM?

I plan on doing video editing with a program like AVID express pro for my COMM Major.

[leoblob]

Re: Memory... IMO that's not a good deal. You can get two 1GB sticks for $169 (for the pair) from Crucial, who is one of the most highly-respected memory manufacturers. www.crucial.com. They also guarantee that if you buy the memory they recommend, there's a money-back guarantee that it will be compatible with your machine.

How much memory do you have now? If it's less than 2Gb, I'd probably put in more. As for maxing it out, I'm not sure Windows can access all 4Gb, but I don't think it would hurt.

[ryengineer]

snip....is my M-Pro RAID 5 capable?....snip

IntelliStation M pro is Raid capable but the model in your possession isn't, so you can either install a Raid controller in an empty PCI slot or as an alternative solution use software raid (which requires server OS from Microsoft).

snip....Is this a better solution than having 4 separate drives?...snip

No and yes (in your case since you're going to benefit from it), I suggest you search the web for things like why raid is used, what are the benefits, failure rates, drawbacks, data recovery etc. Do your homework beforehand prior to implementing it.

snip....One more thing. Is this a good deal : 4 sticks of 1GB RAM (Paired) for roughly $100 each? I think they're the PC2800 or they're the 3200, I don't remember. Is that a good price, and is it worth it to max out the RAM?...snip

That's a good deal and the maximum amount of memory your IntelliStation can have. Just make sure it's 184-pin DDR DIMM, your IntelliStation supports PC2700 but PC2800 or PC3200 are backward compatible too.

[bill bolton]

My trusted computer salesman has reccommended that I set up a RAID 5. this will create one hard drive out of the 4 (am I right?) and enable me to replace a drive if it fails, and not lose my data.

Is this a better solution than having 4 separate drives?

are there any other solutions out there?

With RAID 5 you get protection from a single disk failure only but lose 25% of the total drive capacity to achieve that in a 4 drive array.

Most controllers that support RAID5 will also support a configuration called JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) which merges all the space across all of the drives so that it appears as one single volume, but provides no protection from drive failure.

If you want to maximise storage capacity JBOD is best, if you want to protect agains a single drive failure on-the-fly, then RAID5 is best.

In either case, you should be backing up your data to an external backup device, as data stored on a RAID5 array can still be lost for a number of reasons.

Cheers,

Bill B.

[Andersonjoe711]

looks like it's time for me to hit the books again. Thanks for the info!

[Andersonjoe711]

O.K. So, I have an external USB enclosure that will support up to 500GB, which I will be using to backup my files. Talking to the head of the media department, he suggests not doing extensive media work or editing on the Hard drive that I run windows with, just to save excessive spinning, and to prolong drive life.

Should I dedicate one of my 4 drives to strictly work, and link the other three to help reduce data loss?

Will my original idea reduce the strain if all four drives work together, rather that relying on one drive?

what solution would be most benificial to me for what I'm doing?

I apologize for the barrage of questions, but I'm curious, and I'd like to tackle this before I begin work in my new major (1 to 2 semesters away)

to recap: I have my intellistation in my sig, I plan on maxing out the RAM to 4 gigs, and maxing out hard drive space with 4 identical drives, most likely the ones from IBM that were an option for the 6230. I plan on keeping my media (any videos I create, as well as my library of Cd's, and any video editing software, as well as a few games) on my computer. of course, I will be creating a backup of my finished products to DVD.

I'm running XP Pro 32-bit on it. this leads me to another question, is it possible to upgrade to 64 bit? I've heard it runs video editing better.


thank you all for your time!

[bill bolton]

Talking to the head of the media department, he suggests not doing extensive media work or editing on the Hard drive that I run windows with, just to save excessive spinning, and to prolong drive life.

There is credible research from Google, based on their experience in the Googleplex, which strongly suggests that drives have a finite life whether they are use a lot or a little (I don't have the reference handy, but I'm sure it not hard to find). I wouldn't pay any attention to that advice from the head of the media dept!

what solution would be most benificial to me for what I'm doing?

If you are not backing up your creative work-in-progress on a daily basis, it would be a good idea for you to use a RAID array on at least some of the drives.

In my general experience, it is not a good idea to put a desktop operating system on a RAID array, so you might want to keep one drive out of the RAID array and use that as a boot drive, and for non-critical data storage (that is, things that you can restore easily if you need to).

Cheers,

Bill

[leoblob]

Just noticing this... if Crucial has them for $85 each, why is the OP's proposed $100 each a good deal?

[Andersonjoe711]

Good things to know. Thanks Bill!

[whizkid]

For video editing, you should look at RAID 10 (or 0+1) and RAID 3 (which is rare).

RAID 10 uses four drives: Two are spanned using RAID 0, so it's twice as fast as a single drive, then those two drives are copied with a duplicate pair a la RAID 1. You only get the space of two drives, but it's twice as fast.

RAID 5 will work just fine as well. You could set up three drives and have a spare. Some controllers will make a fourth drive a "hot" spare and use it when one of the three fails. Of course, you'd only have the space of two drives this way, and it's not as fast as RAID 10.

RAID 3 is supposed to have much better write performance than RAID 5, but that's all I know about it.

BTW, I have an Adaptec 2100S sitting in a closet I'd be willing to sell if anyone is interested. It's an awesome SCSI RAID controller that was about $700 new a few years ago. Of course, it requires SCSI drives.

[ryengineer]

Just noticing this... if Crucial has them for $85 each, why is the OP's proposed $100 each a good deal?

Sorry my bad, I thought the person was saying 4 sticks of 1GB each, for $100 in total = 4GB of memory, the maximum amount of RAM an IntelliStation M pro (6230) can take.

[Andersonjoe711]

Whiz, a fellow student of mine uses RAID 0

I think I may set up two of my 4 drives up as RAID 0 and use it for my editing. Then depending on my need, I could set up the remaining drive to back up my OS.

I'm glad to get a second opinion on this! thanks!

[digitania]

Whiz, a fellow student of mine uses RAID 0

I think I may set up two of my 4 drives up as RAID 0 and use it for my editing. Then depending on my need, I could set up the remaining drive to back up my OS.

I'm glad to get a second opinion on this! thanks!

Hi. Seeing this thread late; will chime in if you don't mind.

RAID0 offers the fastest disk performance with NO data protection. It writes to all the disks in the array simulaneously.

RAID1 offers the next fastest disk performance with the best data protection, but you lose 1/2 the capacity of your disks. RAID1 is hardware disk mirroring. You may also get RAID 0+1 which allows you to mirror more than individual pairs of drives; IBM's RAID controllers implement this as well as RAID 1E, which allows you to do a 'mirror' on an odd number of drives. It writes to one disk but reads from all disks simultaneously.

RAID5 offers the slowest disk performance and some data protection. You lose N-1 the capacity of your disk (that capacity is used for calculated checksum storage to allow your data to still be available in case of a drive failure. You lose about 30% of your write performance to checksum calculation, but you actually get better read performance than that (especially in streaming reads).

Which one is right for you will depend on your application. RAID5 is fine for most everything except maximum disk performance.

As far as the memory is concerned -- if your MPro is still under warranty and the seller is offering genuine OBI memory, that's probably best. If not, then it doesn't matter; you can use whatever you want.

Disclaimer, for what it's worth: I work for IBM, and sell Intel and AMD servers. Used to sell Intellistations, too, but those are going away...

---
Tony

T43 (personal machine)
T61 (work machine)
X30, TP600
ZPro 9228
APro
Miscellaneous other stuff

[leoblob]

...Used to sell Intellistations, too, but those are going away...

As a proud owner of an Intellistation, can you elaborate on this a bit?

[ryengineer]

...Used to sell Intellistations, too, but those are going away...

As a proud owner of an Intellistation, can you elaborate on this a bit?

IBM is planning to sell Server business to lenovo however I'm not sure if that includes (IBM) WorkStations also.

[Andersonjoe711]

Hmmm. I'm starting to get confused. Oh well. I'll figure it out eventually.


What is the maximum size hard drive that will work with my M pro? Th eones listed through IBM, or can I throw a few 500GB drives in there?

[ryengineer]

Your model has two serial ATA hard disk drive connectors on the system board and the bays accept 3.5'' drives, so if your BIOS is up to date then it would support drives with greatest capacity available in the market today.

Support for IntelliStation M Pro.

EDIT: IBM stopped manufacturing IntelliStations.

[Andersonjoe711]

would these work ok with my computer?

and is it a big difference that they arent PC2700?

[ryengineer]

Following are better and compatible deals:

Deal 1.

Deal 2.

Your IntelliStation accepts PC2700 or PC3200 DDR DIMMs, the memory you quoted would work at slower speed but I don't think it's worth buying (price wise too).

[Andersonjoe711]

wow! thanks for the deals!

just shows what you can find if you really look hard enough.