# To RAID or not to RAID?



## ewelltide (Aug 15, 2011)

Does anyone have any experience using a RAID card with Lightroom?  If so, just how big of a difference does it make and exactly how does it help?  I'm willing to shell out the serious money to buy one if it really improves my workflow, but if the results are negligible I may pass.  Any advice would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!!

If you have a few extra minutes and could tell me your drive config, that would also help.

thanks,

ewelltide


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## b_gossweiler (Aug 15, 2011)

You need to specify what kind of RAID you're considering. Do you want to achieve speed or data protection?

Beat


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## ewelltide (Aug 15, 2011)

I'm considering both striped and mirrored, but my main concern is speed, so striped.  Primarily the speed transfer of the photos when in develop mode paramount creating a faster workflow.  After a trip I work with thousands of 25meg images and it's slowly killing me waiting for each image to clear up.  Thanks for the question


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## Gene McCullagh (Aug 15, 2011)

Take a look at Drobo if you haven't already. It has many of the RAID benefits without all of the headaches. Depending on your connection the speed can be very good.


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## ewelltide (Aug 15, 2011)

will do, thanks for the tip Gene!!!


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## b_gossweiler (Aug 15, 2011)

ewelltide,

There are a lot of factors influencing performance. As for develop work, this is mainly:

Size and location of the ACR cache
Size and location of the originals
CPU power
Regarding your question about RAIDing:

It is generally accepted that the best performance results in LR can be achieved by separating catalog, possibly previews, ACR cache and originals onto different volumes, so access to this data does not interfere with each other.
Of course, if each (or some) of these volumes are stripe sets, you will gain performance.
As far as data protection goes, be aware that your RAID controller might be the single point of control
The fast disk I/O may be limited by what your CPU is able to chew
I run an i7-980x (6 core, 3.33 GHz) system with a 3Ware RAID10 array containing 4 WD Velociraptor 10K drives, which holds the catalog and the originals. I keep the previews and the ACR cache on an SSD, because I don't need data protection on those.

 When loading an image in develop, my sliders mostly free up in less than a second, taking 1-4 seconds for the image to load completely.

But, as always with these questions, YMMV.

Beat


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## edgley (Aug 17, 2011)

I have a software RAID of 4 discs, set up with various partitions.
It give me around 250 MB/s read / writes.

Have a look at Intels Matrix Storage information, could let you try a software RAID for no money. 
I used to use it when I was PC based:
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/matrixstorage_sb.htm


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## simonb (Aug 23, 2011)

I have been pondering over the same thing for a week now and can't seem to decide if I should get a raid card already.  

I am not that quite confident with using raid on bigger files as they might be of a burden in caching rather than be of use.  But I know that volumes which are stripes will gain me performance, which I already have.


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## edgley (Aug 26, 2011)

I have debated over the hardware RAID card for each of the years that I have owned my Pro.
Since sticking a SSD in my MBP and see how stupidly fast it is I think I am going to get 4xSSDs and make a software RAID instead.

At least then when I upgrade the Pro the SSDs will work in the new whilst the RAID card might not.


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## b_gossweiler (Aug 27, 2011)

Just as a sidenote (which might not apply to your SW RAID), when I evaluated my new system half a year ago, there were no RAID controllers available supporting SSD's correctly (i.e. TRIM). For this reason (because I wanted at least HW controlled RAID1 on all my internal drives), I was not able to build my system entirely based on SSD's.

Beat


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## edgley (Aug 27, 2011)

True, Lion now does support TRIM so maybe there will be an updated RAID card.
Considering none of my software makes use of all of my cores I am not that bothered about being S/W only; better than none


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## ewelltide (Aug 28, 2011)

This is all very helpful.  Thanks to all who have contributed.  It's a tough choice simply because it's a potentially expensive addition to a new computer, but sounds like it might be worth it.  SSD and RAID, sounds ideal, we'll see.  Thinking of my next camera, which will have even larger files to deal with, I speed will become an even bigger issue.  

Thx,

ewelltide


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