[Ardour-Users] Which RAID is best?

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2008, Chris Stranex wrote:

> Could someone give me insight as to which is best for audio work? I was
> thinking either RAID0+1 or RAID 5 would be suitable but which one does
> everyone recommend?

I think most RAID types will work fine for audio applications.  If you're 
going to be working on projects with high track counts and high bit and 
sample rates, you could overrun the performance capabilities of a single 
drive, but for smaller projects, chances are that the drive will not be 
the bottleneck as long as your OS is using it correctly.  I don't think 
there are any particularly compelling arguments 0+1 over 5 or vice versa.
RAID 0+1 requires 4 drives and RAID 5 requires a minimum of 3 drives.

In either case, the extra reliability afforded by RAID 0+1, 1+0, or 5 is 
definitely a win for keeping your projects intact when a disk dies, in 
addition to backing projects up regularly, either to another drive or 
other media (DVD, memory stick, etc).  Backing up large projects will be 
even easier once Blu-Ray burners start to come down in price.

If possible, it's still a good idea to keep your system and other 
non-audio partitions on separate disks or separate RAID sets.

jms