Hello Pascal.
I have the exact same setups in two offices. I am very happy with Raid 6 with no spare. Options available are:
JBOD = 29.1 TB formatted capacity. 16 drives at 1.82TB usable storage each. RAID 5 = 27.28 formatted, using 1 parity drive RAID 6 = 25.46 formatted, using 2 parity drives. RAID 6 + spare = 23.65 TB using 2 parity drives + 1 hot spare.
I highlighted the Raid 6 using 2 parity drives since that's what I use. It's also the setup recommended in Apple's Best Practics for XSAN.
Server is connected via Small Tree 10GB Ethernet to the core switch. I am very happy with the performance and reliability. Each office has about 30 users + render farm nodes that hammer their servers all day.
Best of luck.
Victor DiMichina Pixel Magic Los Angeles • Lafayette
On Apr 17, 2011, at 9:49 PM, Pascal Grosvenor wrote: [posted to rush.general]
Hello,
I'm setting up a new Promise VTrak Raid for a new renderfarm i'm building (it's got 16 x 2 TB drives). It will be connected directly to an Apple Xserve. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions for how to configure it ?
Given the nature of rendering (having lots of clients writing individual rendered frames back to the RAID) i reason that high write speed is probably the most important feature in choosing a RAID level.
I'm thinking 0+1 would give the highest write performance but then i only get 50% effective disk space. I'm thinking there's probably something in between 0+1 and RAID 5 that could be suitable ... That would give more disk space than 0 + 1 and better performance than 5.
Would love to hear other people's thoughts and experiences.
kind regards Pascal
---- Pascal Grosvenor Faculty Computing Unit, Design, Architecture & Building University of Technology, Sydney ph 9514 8944
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