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I do video production and thus have a lot of large files. I ran out of room on my 4tb storage drive so I bought two 5tb WD Black drives. I installed them and set it up as a windows striped volume. Ends up with about 9.5tb free space. I copied my 4 tb drive to it and ran a disk speed test.

The read speed is less than the write speed according to the test. I tested the 4tb drive in a usb3 reader and the samsung 950 I have for a system drive and they did not test that way.

Am I going to have an issue? Is the read speed an indication something is going to go wrong? I'm using premiere and have another ssd for scratch and then I edit from the array.

Regarding backups, What I do is copy the data to the internal drive to work from them copy that to an external drive for backup. Then I make my edits and copy the files to that external drive. I do this for each client, meaning every client has an external backup.

Thanks

ahackney
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  • No, Very strange... performance should be (almost) double using a RAID 0; even if it is a sofware raid. BTW windows raid is actually better than "customer grade" Intel raid... Please try to "split" the disks and do some benchmarks on both of them. And (if you do only video rendering) select a very big cluster and stripe size. – AndreaCi Apr 15 '16 at 14:16

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I wouldn't say you're going to have an issue. Read/Write speeds can vary on a lot of things when it comes to individual desktop setups. Setting up a RAID-0 is usually only a good idea if you know for a fact that your hard drive is causing a bottleneck. RAID-0 can reduce or remove the hard drive bottleneck if your hard drive was having problems keeping up with the amount of data it had to write but not necessarily if you had a bottleneck related to reading.

The problem when it comes to reading data is that your computer still has to put that data back together in the correct order. If you have a controller that is slow or some other process that bogs down the reads from your drives, then you may not get stellar read speeds.

Also, note that while RAID-0 should in theory provide double speeds, it has been almost universally proven that this is never the case. Depending on the use-case, performance can actually decrease, particularly if you are doing something that has a lot more read operations than write operations.

FWIW, this article on AnandTech shows some tests they ran on different uses. The article does suggest using the largest stripe size to get the most performance gains, though overall it concludes RAID-0 may not be worth it based on their test results. YMMV. http://www.anandtech.com/show/1371/2

JeffyB
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