Strongly considering using my x2 OCZ Vortex sata III 120gb SSDs on a raid 0 array using my motherboards on-board intel raid (6gb/sec) for installing windows 7 64bit pro and ONLY using for the operating system and the few DAW necessary software programs to function as a solid DAW.

I am wondering if anyone has had any issues of running this set up raid 0 with x2 identical solid state drives? I have heard peeps in the past say that raid is super bad for recording and daws but I do not intend to write data from recording onto the solid state drives I will be using Seagate SataIII hard drives running NON-raid just regular SATA III for recording data.

Any input greatly appreciated thanks

So you would have 240GB of C drive space for the OS and the DAW software. How much space do you need for all of those programs together?

Also, can you post your system specs? I would like to see if there is a more effcient way to set up your system and give you performance and reliability.

If at all possible i would avoid raid0 setups for something as critical as a DAW unless you have a very solid backup scheme for the system. If one of the drives goes they whole thing is done.

In most cases with sata3 ssds they are already extremely fast and raid 0 may not give you any real performance boost but post your system specs and we can give you options to try.



Sent from my SCH-I535

In the age of 960Gb SSDs for $600 (or 480Gb for $400, or 240Gb for $200) if you need fast storage I wouldn't futz around with RAIDing up a couple of older, smaller SSDs.

Personally I wouldn't worry about using SSD in raid in the sense of why bother wasting the storage space. I've recenlty had the same quandary as yourself and in the end used one for the OS and DAW programs and the second drive for secondary programs and file storage.

IF you are only going to be using the system for DAW work, audio editing, recording etc I dont think you would see many benefits. Correct me if I am wrong but you will only see OS and programs load faster (to an extent depending on the speed of program load times anyway). Once you are working in the DAW environment I dont believe you would see or feel any benefits unless audio rendering and so on.

As far as using in raid no experience and have always steered clear of RAID tbh. As a thought personally I dont quite trust the reliability of SSDs with data and have to wonder if RAID is going to magnify the issue. Know its not of much help but thought Id pipe in.

I do have four SSD's in my DAW PC, one 256gb system drive, one 256gb for project work and two 500gb Samsung 830s in Raid 0.

Having a single 6gb SATA for a system drive is definatly a great idea, but you wont notice that much increase (system files are normally quite small, so have the longest read times) if you have a raid 0 system drive. There is no way i would split the system drive in raid 0, even with regular backups, its just too risky for corruption.

Raid 0'ing my data drives has been awesome. 950mb/s read speed for libraries is REALLY noticable with Kontakt and previewing samples is so much quicker and slicker than with a mechanical.

Of course, there is no way i would have a raid array without a mechanical backup drive that works incrementally overnight.

Raid 0 for OS is insane, dangerous, unnecessary, and with the Vertex 3, even more.

Wow awesome discussion on this post guys! Wow I guess I had no idea that running raid 0 with 2 identical SSDs / Vertex III's is dangerous, unstable or insane. I have been running this set up on my work box for over a year and its pretty damn fast... and hasnt had any issues. The reason I asked is because I just bought x2 500gb Sata III Samsung top of the line SSDs ( Amazon.com: Samsung Electronics 840 Pro Series 2.5-Inch 512 SATA_6_0_gb Solid State Drive MZ-7PD512BW: Electronics ) which will be used in my new work box and I was thinking of using the x2 OCZs for DAW. My understanding is as long as you run SSDs with at least 40% free total space you will not suffer performance loss but once you start getting over the 40% mark of free space the drives tend to slow down drastically.

Tombot sounds like he has had success running SSDs for his DAW but sounds like he only used one for op system with no raid and one for writing recording audio data to with no raid. Then the x2 500gb samsung sata IIs on raid 0 for fast storage.

Hmmm I dont know but I am still really tempted to just try running these OCZs raid 0 like i have been for a year on this work box here for DAW.

DAW PLUS can you please explain why "Raid 0 for OS is insane, dangerous, unnecessary, and with the Vertex 3, even more." ?

Also My friend who wins awards for his water cooled PC builds (PCJunkie) runs x2 top of the line intel Sata III SSDs Raid 0 as his Windows 7 64bit pro Op system drive as well. He has not had any problems and has reported blazing speed. This is not a DAW box tho more a work/gaming box. Just some input on the discussion I thought might be useful.

Yeah, you don't need Raid SSDs to use a daw, you're not playing Crysis 3.

Tombot... thanks for this info! I've been considering RAID 0 but always decide to stay away b/c I just don't want to have too many working parts to a system..... however, I never considered it just for my sample libraries. That sounds like a pretty good idea.

For my sample drived I have a SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB SSD, and a 7200rpm 500GB WD mechanical HD.

Would I see an improvement here? Kontakt still takes a while to load, despite the large stuff being on the SSD.


DAW Plus.... any recommendations here? Should I stay the course... or Raid 0 these 2 library drives? They are for read only purposes.




Specs:
i7 3930K @ 4.8GHz
32 GB RAM @ 1866Mhz
Asus R IV Formula
Samsung Pro 840 128GB OS drive
Sandisk 256GB SSD
3 x 7200 500GB Western Digital HD drives
Win 7 x64

Samples w/ large multi-sampled patches (ie.. 1GB Kontakt instrument, 2GB Trilian bass patch) are on the SSD.
Large libraries that have tons and tons of small patches that load quickly are on the HD.

and that right there is the 100% correct FACT

have to be out of your mind to raid 0 an OS.


Scott
ADK

You do not gain speed by the higher bandwidth on an OS drive. It is the opposite of redundancy, if one drive fails all data is lost (i.e. 100% higher risk of data loss).
Vertex3 is an SSD with a relatively high failure rate. The latest firmware seems pretty ok but I would not use them in RAID 0. But then again, many SSD/controller/Raid array combos are unreliable.

If you bring up task manager you can click on the "resource monitor" button. When that starts, hit the "disk" tab. It will show you total B/second. It will also show you what files are being used. On my PC, right now, sitting pretty much idle it's averaging a around 30,000 bytes per second (mostly firefox).

You can do the same thing and watch your DAW load. If you don't have much disk access on the OS drive, then you won't gain much by making it faster. I use velociraptor drives.

I rarely shut down my PC -- usually I put it to sleep. It normally wakes up before the monitor is showing an image.

Yep, that was completely what i was getting at, but you put it so much more clearly. You wont see any noticable speed increase on the system drive in raid 0, but double the risk of it trashing it. Dont do it!

This is an old thread, but I have used the following setup since 2011 with excellent results.
I have yet to see a track count or mixing session that stumbles, stutters, pops, clicks, or crashes.

MSI Big Bang II Mainboard
OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 240MB PCIe SSD - System Drive
WD Velociraptor 600GB 10,000RPM - Recording \ Project Drive
RAMDISK 10GB (Corsair 1866mhz Memory) - VST \ Samples

RME HDSPe RAYDAT PCIe - Audio Interface (Big improvement over USB 2.0 or Firewire)

I have a Seagate main storage drive for basic storage needs of 2TB, and a Seagate Backup drive of 2TB, as well as a Toshiba 3TB External Backup drive.

In my opinion, when it comes to tracking, having a PCIe audio interface rather than USB is the major factor, especially when tracking drums and you start to tax the system bus. USB falls short.

Also your HDD write speeds are a factor in tracking. I chose the WD Raptor for the spin speed, over an SSD for longevity reasons. Using an SSD for tracking is a terrible idea, yeah the write speed is a little higher, but when you track you can possibly retrack the same takes 20 to 50 times depending on the project and who you are working with. I don't think an SSD will last too long under those conditions, and most modern mechanical HDDs can easily handle 15-20 tracks being written, if you disable read \ write cashe in properties. When mixing, it's all about RAM size and hard disk read speeds, and you want a stable audio interface for buffer size changes. I mix around 1024 sample on buffer latency, and recording i can get down to 32 samples, somewhere near 0ms of latency(less than .3 ms).

My work computer for CAD is Raid-0

Solid Edge is a single threaded parametric modeling software that needs all the horse power I can throw at it.

For that computer I went with a BOXX Apex II 4.5 Ghz Raid-0 w/ both SS drive at 2.5 ms seek.

For Audio, I don't think that's the best way to go. For that I use an Audio Labs PC configured this way:

SS drive for the OS, 1 TB 7200RPM for samples, and another 1TB 7200RPM for the tracks. 6 core I7 second gen -5 year old computer. I recently upgrade to 24 from 12 gigs and added a second network card for copperland/Alyseum MIDI used at the same time as a Nucleus. Two MX4 cards for MADI.

@ bubingaisgod
If you avoid budget modes, then good current SSDs could handle really lot of writes.. several hundreds of TBs. Even with heavy sessions, it's still light use compared to some use with sustained sever workload. You can get this value from drive datasheet before purchase and you can also monitor drive over its lifespan and check wearout indicators or reallocated sectors using SMART utilities.

While I agree about good performance of PCIe intefaces, your latency figures are really exaggerated.. RTL is always at least 2x ASIO buffer, some transfer and processing latency and latency at A/D and D/A converters. At standard 44100 rate, it would likely something like 3-4ms in Total.
Of course, if you have digital only card like RayDat, it doesn't report any converter latency (driver can't "know", which one will be used).

Michal

interesting discussion. i'm doing a new pc build with 2x 1TB M.2 pciex4 NVMe drives (1 OS, 1 Samples) + 2x 1TB SSD SataIII drives in RAID-0 (Audio Record) + 2x 1TB SSD SataIII drives in RAID-0 (Playback) + 1x 2TB SSD SataIII (Backup). haven't decided yet between 3.6ghz hexacore or 3.2ghz octacore (Broadwell-E) cpu for the X99 board running 128gb of DDR4-3300. in fact, after I do the math, the Record and Playback drives might be changed up to PCIE SSDs too. 6 or 7 PCIE slots is a huge playground. Throw in one or two UAD2 Octo's and things will get interesting. what gets on my nerves is the RME Hdspe AES32 PCIE 'daughter-card' which doesn't use a PCIE slot, but is connected to the main card by a ribbon cable. I've thought about cutting a hole in the case chassis for it. Oh yeah almost forgot, only using a single-wide x8 videocard, so that helps cut down on utilized lanes too. RAID can be your friend, or your enemy. You make the call. It's your decision.

Why so many drives..? Setup looks more like a storage server than DAW setup.
Are you positive, that it would really make some difference.. Honestly I really doubt about the two SSD RAID-0 arrays (4 drives total) for track record and playback.
Current normal SATA drives (eg. not SSDs) will be more than sufficient to reliably stream many tracks together. (use this calculator to find out data rates - https://www.sounddevices.com/tech-no...e-calculations .. even with some overheard, you shouldn't have any problem to meet that with normal drive)
Also separate drives for record and playback makes sense maybe only for a setup, where you really play and record over hundred of simultaneous physical tracks in and out.. even with big outboard console, you typically play tens of source tracks, but record just master bus and maybe couple of stems back to DAW.
With ITB workflow.. say even with some outboard summing of buses, it's lot less than that, as you mainly play the tracks and then do some bounce/export from that.
Plus lot of projects today has so many tracks only because there is so much duplicated stuff for various parallel techniques and effects so takes are being read only once from the drive.
Practically speaking.. we have for example one room with SSL MX4 (2x MADI I/O) and regularly doing live concert mixing (say about 60-70 long running src. tracks), outboard mixing at digital console in 5.1 and say 12-15 tracks recording back to DAW. The workstation has normal RAID-1 from two spinning 3TB WD Blacks. Not even single hiccup or problems with its speed during cca 2.5 years of use. Even single consumer SSD with much smaller capacity than your plan (eg. with less NAND chips, which are internally parallelized) will dance in circles around our setup.

IMO, I'd start with less drives, leave some case real estate for possible expansion, if you found, it will lack something and put your saved money rather to some external NAS appliance, which is much better and safer solution for archiving and backups.

Of course you might have different opinion about that.

Michal

Hello, I need help please. Here is my system:
- Asus ROG Maximus Xl Hero (wi-fi) Motherboard
- Intel Core i9-9900K cpu @ 3.60GHz, 3600MHz 8 cores, 16 logical processors
- 64 GB Ram
- 2 samsung 970 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD's 512GB - set up as Raid 0 size - 952.60 GB, Free Space - 616.03GB
- 1 Western Digital 2TB WD Black Performance Internal Hard Drive HDD - 7200 RPM, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD2003FZEX
- 1 Seagate Expansion SCSI External Hard Drive, size - 1.82 TB
- Graphics - I'm using Intel(R) UHD Graphics 630, I believe it is onboard. I havent installed a Graphics card separately.
- Steinberg UR28M Audio Interface
- Windows 11 Pro OS
- Steinberg Cubase 14 Pro DAW

My OS is installed on the Raid 0 ssd's as is Cubase Daw. I use the WD hard drive for my daw projects and the Seagate external drive as a backup drive.
Ive setup my system according to specs given at Steinberg's website on how to setup a DAW computer System. It's basically a few tweeks in the OS and the BIOS. I'm only using windows defender, no other virus protection software. When I record I diable all networks - ethernet / wifi etc, etc....When I record just my guitar plugged into the UR28M and usuaslly usw a reverb insert in trhe daw many times I get a CPU Overload Error. And everything stops,
Can anyone help me with any tips? Thank you
Also, I regret making the RAID 0 with the 2 SSD's from everything I've read. Is there a way to go back?