RAID

[Chris Rizzo]

Is anyone running RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) on their computers? Raid level 0 generally allows hard drive access at twice conventional speeds... Is Mastercam dependent enough on hardrive access to warrant a RAID setup, or do we just keep stacking up the RAM? Although another benefit of other RAID configurations (1-5) are the redundant hardrives in the event of a hard drive failure...

[Dan Bedore]

I think hard drive access speed will help you some along with processor speed, but i don't know that stacking ram will help much. I am running 3 different boxes a 400mhz dell with 512meg ram,a 400mhz clone with 384meg ram and diamond viper v550 video card, a 2.2ghz dell with 1.5gb ram wildcat ll 5110 video card. I daily work with files around 2mb and at times work with files as big as 46mb. the 2.2ghz dell is faster but no where near what i would expect with the magnatude of change of processor speed and increase of Ram. I wish I knew what the limiting factor was in mastercam. some times i creat finish passes that are 40mb and that is where i see the difference between my computers. 1/3 the time processing and posting.

[cadcam]

CMR as I know of right now only raid "0" is supported by te MC side the others at this time seem to cause issues.

I am about to try a raid 5 setup over the holiday.

I got a hold of a SCSI rad card and 5 SCSI drives to play.

 

Dan Bedore as for me and speed I see a big diffrence all round between my P3 650 and my P3 800 and a even bigger one between my P3 1gig and my 2 gig.

 

now I am with you on the diffrence between my 2gig and my 2.53 its more in the surfacing is were I see the speed.

I have not gotton a chance to build a 3.06gig system yet with multy threading.

but am looking forward to it.

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

Hello,

 

In previous versions of Mastercam (V8.x in particular) htere were issues with a RAID 0 configuration. You could not reproduce them and it was not the same problem every time but once RAID 0 was removed, the problems went away. Most however were related to toolpath generation.

 

I think the problem lies in how the array is spaning multiple physical disks though the system only sees one. Data storage is rather funny. Information does not always get stored in one location or in contiguous(sp?) clusters. Sometimes even the same file is broken into multiple fragments and one fragment may be on one physical disk and another fragment may be on one of the others.

 

JM2C

[Joe @ Perfect Fit]

Not that it matters CadCam, but RAID is transparent to an an application. Any Raid that you witnessed giving troubles to MC was the result of another issue, unrelated. I have used various levels of raid, both hardware, and crappy software with the app...

 

jlc

[cadcam]

Ritmo2k so you are saying that you have used raid with MC in all ways from Raid 0 to 5 and in 0+1 and have had know trouble?

 

Were some of are info is coming from MC dealers more then open public.

quote:

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Not that it matters CadCam, but RAID is transparent to an an application.

---

Then why are we haveing trouble?

 

I know waht what you mean,but why does it not matter?

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

quote:

---

...but RAID is transparent to an an application...

---

This true on the surface, but no matter what software or hardware does, it still does not change the fact that you have multiple drives in your box and you are spanning information across multiple physical drives acting as a single drive which is where I believe the problem lies. I have personally witnessed issues with RAID 0 with Striping on multiple boxes but have seen mirroring successfully implemented on several others. So if you've got some information the rest of us don't have please share what you know.

[Joe @ Perfect Fit]

Bottom line is, my career started in IT. I have used all sorts of server/s and configs in various "lab" environments while I juggled the IT needs of a company I worked for, while doing 5-axis cutting in MC(I had access to the equip while I tested rollouts, or upgrades etc). I assure you the app is not aware of the disc setup "IF YOUR 'PUTER IS SETUP RIGHT" Any computer with a fualty disc subsystem is not going to work in various unexpected ways. If the box is setup right, it works. I am running MC on a box with an adaptec 2000s running raid 0 across 3 18gig 10k rpm 'cuddas at a cust site now. Its also a dual xeon w/ 2gig of rambus ram and a wildcat card. Dude, it smokes. Not a hiccup... I spec'ed out all the equip, so trust me. It's experience that talks, not BS.

jlc

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

One thing in common the units that had problems, they were running Promise IDE RAID controllers not Adaptec. Perhaps there lies the issue.........???????

 

So Ritmo2k, who are you?

[Bullines]

Don't get me started on Promise RAID controllers...argh, those suck

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

Perhaps THAT was the issue and not the RAID config/setup itself.

 

Usually I like to give Hardware Mfrs. the benefit of the doubt because it's so easy to blame software ya know?

 

Well, HI HO, HI HO, it off to get Adaptec RAID I go!

 

So Bullines, what's up with Promise?

[Bullines]

I have never seen as many hard drives fail in my life, than the with ones that have been hooked up to Promise RAID controllers. In three separate machines with three separate Promise RAID controllers, I've seen three hard drives fail. They're hard drive killers, IMO. If RAID is desired, go the SCSI route.

[Joe @ Perfect Fit]

OMG!!!!!

If anyone says the word promise, ill rage. I have done countless restores from those POS's man. I will not sell one/ work on/ or have anything to do with those friggin POS's...

 

That is EXACTLY your problem.

 

As far as who am I James Meyette, I am a user from way back. I owned a company with a relative who screwed me, he he.. Now I do reverse engineering for a company in T.O. I am also an Imageware VAR in Canada. I used to make auto accessories, and I reverse engineered all my models, as getting CAD on cars for our OEM contracts was a real PITA. So now I moved away from the fun stuff(machining) and am doing strictly design now. Its cool to, but ya know... I had an opportunity to do some machining for a customer and couldn’t bloody refuse. I had lotsa fun in the day with MC. I had a 5-axis router, and built my molds, and did thermoform trimming on it...

jlc

[Chris Rizzo]

Here is an interesting link on using windows 2000 to simulate a RAID controller... http://www4.tomshardware.com/howto/20010906/index.html

[Joe @ Perfect Fit]

Didnt read much of it, but i think it fails to mention Software raid in windows NT(v4,v5...) can only be done on Server versions of NT. And to add to that, all of the calculations, like parity if applicable, or strip calcs are done by the OS now, and that SUX!!!!! Hardware RAID si the only solution. No true admin, and none that I know use it. Its not worth a paper wieght unfortunately. Windows can do RAID 0,1, and 5, but again, only server versions.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;293420

 

Sorry friends..

jlc

[kwolf]

Hi,

 

I have another question regarding RAID.

We have some systems with mobo's that features below:

133 UDMA - and built in Promise IDE 133UDMA controller.

And we have one Hard Disk per any system (7200 rpm - Maxtor ATA133)

 

Another friend told us we can get higher speed from Hard Disk if we connect HD to RAID controller on any machine instead of E-IDE controller.

Is it true? And if yes , does it have any incompatibities?

 

Thanks in advance

 

[ 12-21-2002, 12:47 AM: Message edited by: kwolf ]

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

Ritmo2k,

 

The reason I asked was because you "sounded" liek a friend of mine but alas you are not him. Well; welcome to the forum and I look forward to reading your takes.

[PastyPie]

Presumably the issue here is about increasing the performance of you computer whilst running Mastercam. Like with any computer system the trick lies with identifying the bottle neck that is causing you machine to slow down. With a CADCAM program I would have thought that fast disk read/write times is great but not the most important factor. Take a look at your machine whilst you are using it, are you constantly opening and saving file every few seconds or so? Liken this to say a file server; in this scenario you might have 100’s maybe 1000’s of people writing files to an array of disks at the same time in which case read/write time is critical.

 

Is your disk light constantly on whilst you are using your machine? This might imply a lack of RAM due to excessive disk caching (this is the paging file on a Windows machine). If you are using Windows NT, 2000 or XP open your task manager check the CPU utilization and amount of free RAM, do they constantly run above 75%? If you have two or more physical disks in your machine try putting the paging file on a separate disk from the OS.

 

I have installed a lot of computer system for CADCAM work. In my experience the most important factors for a fast machine are RAM, CPU, and graphics adapter in that order. Recently I installed twenty Dell MT530 workstations in our drawing office all have plenty of RAM and fast CPU’s, and all have a single SCSI disk an they all cope very well indeed even with large complex models using Solidedge.

 

Look at pre-built workstations from Dell or Compaq etc. none that I know off come with hardware RAID controllers. RAID is primarily a technology for servers providing faster disk readwrite times and fault tolerance. If you still want to use a RAID array in your machine use a hardware RAID setup (as previously mentioned by someone else) but you might fined the cost outweighs the gains.

[cadcam]

kwolf if you are reading ahead you will see they are talking about the raid Promis as you have asked.

And they are saying this setup is trouble.

 

James the setups you saw were any of them SCSI raid?

 

If I get the time over the vactaion time I am going to setup my Scsi raid 5 with 5 drives and see if I can get it work like Ritmo2k stated.

 

Ritmo2k are you in L.A Cali?

[Joe @ Perfect Fit]

No cadcam, i am in t.o., canada. AFAIK, RAID is far from the most important thing in cad workstation, unless you deal with say HUGE scan data etc, where you are writing potentially gigs of info often during processing.

jlc

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

quote:

---

James the setups you saw were any of them SCSI raid?

---

No, all were IDE. It seems as though there is no substitute for SCSI RAID. RAID with Mirroring seems like a good place to go. True you don;t get the read/write speed as you do with striping but you get data redundancy (read good backups incase a drive goes down). Jay, you shoud see if your SCSI Adapter handles Hot-Swappable drives. That's awesome. One drive goes down, software lets you know, pull it out, drop another one in, it formats itself and mirrors the data.

 

Have fun, let me know how things come out.

[kwolf]

cadcam,

 

What I want to know is, is it feasible to connect ONLY ONE HD to a RAID channel?Is there any performance gain in connecting ONLY ONE HD to a IDE-RAID channel instead of Standard IDE?

I don't want any mirroring or striping feature, I want to know if it's faster?

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

kwolf,

 

RAID -

 

Redundant

Array

Independent or some say Inexpensive

Drives

 

HTH

 

[ 12-22-2002, 03:30 AM: Message edited by: James Meyette ]

[Guest CNC Apps Guy 1]

Check this out;

 

For the whole thing go here;

RAID Web what is RAID

 

RAID Concept

 

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) is an acronym first used in a 1988 paper by Berkeley researchers Patterson, Gibson and Katz. It described array configuration and applications for multiple inexpensive hard disks, providing fault tolerance (redundancy) and improved access rates.

 

RAID provides a method of accessing multiple individual disks as if the array were one larger disk, spreading data access out over these multiple disks, thereby reducing the risk of losing all data if one drive fails, and improving access time.

 

Why use RAID

 

Typically the RAID is used in large file servers, transaction of application servers, where data accessibility is critical, and fault tolerance is required. Nowadays, RAID is also being used in desktop systems for CAD, multimedia editing and playback where higher transfer rates are needed.

 

RAID Levels

 

RAID 0: Also known as "Disk Striping", this is technically not a RAID level since it provides no fault tolerance. Data is written in blocks across multiple drives, so one drive can be writing or reading a block while the next is seeking the next block.

 

The advantages of striping are the higher access rate, and full utilization of the array capacity. The disadvantage is there is no fault tolerance - if one drive fails, the entire contents of the array become inaccessible.

 

 

RAID 1: Known as "Disk Mirroring" provides redundancy by writing twice - once to each drive. If one drive fails, the other contains an exact duplicate of the data and the RAID can switch to using the mirror drive with no lapse in user accessibility. The disadvantages of mirroring are no improvement in data access speed, and higher cost, since twice the number of drives is required. However, it provides the best protection of data since the array management software will simply direct all application requests to the surviving disk members when a member of disk fails.

 

 

RAID 3: RAID level 3 stripes data across multiple drives, with an additional drive dedicated to parity, for error correction/recovery.

 

 

RAID 5: RAID level 5 is the most popular configuration, providing striping as well as parity for error recovery. In RAID 5, the parity block is distributed among the drives of array, giving a more balanced access load across the drives. The parity information is used to recovery data if one drive fails, and is the reason this method is the most popular. The disadvantage is a relatively slow write cycle (2 reads and 2 writes are required for each block written). The array capacity is N-1, with a minimum of 3 drives required.

 

 

RAID 0+1: This is stripping and mirroring combined, without parity. The advantages are fast data access (like RAID 0), and single ¡V drive fault tolerance (like RAID 1). RAID 0+1 still requires twice the number of disks (like RAID 1).

 

Hope this helps.

 

OH, BTW, this information was gathered from RAIDWeb without Permission but the identical information can be optained from no less than a dozen other sites.

 

[ 12-22-2002, 03:45 AM: Message edited by: James Meyette ]

[Jack Mitchell]

Guy’s

 

If I dare, so rudely, step into the fray.

 

Raid and the like have literally nothing to do with Mastercam or the method we choose to save our files.

 

I built this system with a 733 (The fastest of the fast)- approximately three years ago; I have dabbled with the many forms of raid using five drives, and have concluded that – I cannot afford to double my drives for the sake of archivial safety.

 

Yes, the promise controllers are a little touchy but they always perform – almost as if a band-aid fix for the newer technologies.

 

Nobody with raid experience is impressed with this thread - let’s pursue a healthier more meaningful argument – PLEASE.

 

Regards, Jack