yep
HDD performance & Data Corruption 101
jerryinsync
#22
You bring up a lot of good information about drives going more the way of IT companies. A lot of the testing utilties you mention test directly from the hatrd drives and not under windows.
In any event, on a lsightly higher scale, it is nice to have a drive systems designed specifically for post production and more importantly for HD post production.
http://www.in-sync.com/products/product.php?ID=40918670
1080i still plays back even with a drive missing.
Ice_Czar
#23
well that certainly is a trick RAID6 PCI-X SCSI monster
and yes I covet it, however its just a tad out of my price range currently
Ive made do the its “predecessor”…from half a decade back that is 
a DotHill SANnet 3200\2200 @ 1TB
Dual Channel, Dual RAID, N+1 Power, and about $12,400 less
(actually I have 2 more 3200s as well each ran me about $500 often populated)
definately not the same performance but at this time I dont really need that level either
but others certainly may 
splintah
#25
it doesn´t make rendering faster
it may make saving the image / file faster
so yes, your render may be finished in shorter time
depending on the files it produces
Tarrbot
#26
Well, RAID 5 will not help at all in write speeds.
RAID 0 will but you give up redundancy–and in that if one of the drives or the stripe or the RAID card fails you lose everything.
Rendering is not affected by your drives.
Loading textures or scenes would be as well as saving them. Other than this, you gain nothing from RAID in this sort of configuration.
Thoe99
#28
The article mentioned one of the main problems of harddrive cable is the length of it. Recently, I’ve been having problems accessing files from one of my harddrives that utilizes the ribbon (as opposed to SATA line), and I think it may have to do with my ribbon giving out. So now I’m trying to buy the shortest UDMA cable I can find. Can anyone find one shorter than 18" that still supplies for 2 harddrives?
Tarrbot
#29
You should be fine with 18" cables. The IDE spec doesn’t allow for lengths greater than 18" because the integrity of the signal degrades drastically after that point.
Yes, shorter is always better but 18" cables should be fine.
Thoe99
#30
Well, it turned out to be a windows problem (figures), that I fixed using system restore…not a ribbon problem. It’s odd though, most stores sell 24" cables, even though the ‘IDE standards’ call for cables 18" and shorter.
Tarrbot
#31
And oddly enough, more message boards have been lighting up with “hard drive problems” since major stores started doing this.
What do you do? You just find the ones you need to get the job done. IDE isn’t supposed to be outside the case either, but people do it.
Glad it wasn’t a major issue, though. More importantly, I’m glad it is fixed. 
glassefx
#32
Thank you… I’m printing this tomorrow when I get to work.
Also thanx to whoever pointed out the print format. Boy have I printed out like a boat-load of pages here at CGtalk! They have made indespensable additions to my “3d notebook” I’ve been building since I started this magnificant artform. Actually my roomate stole mine along with my ryobi gas-trimmer and a eight-hundred dollar Lexmark dot-matrix printer while I lay in a comatose state from an auto-accident.
fabianv
#33
So much information stares I wish someone could just build a rig for me… wouldnt that be nice 
hehehe
habanero
#34
I’d just like to add my experience from yester day to this thread as I believe it contains interesting advice.
It’s that for some reason I used the windows tool for partitioning, the one in the “computer browser”, to delete a partition that I didn´t use. The particular partition was one of three inside an enxtended partition, like an envelope partition if you aint familiar with this. The other two were my prime data partition and my Fat partition. Saying yes to deleting the empty one, seeing it take with it my data partition as well nearly made me swear, I guess Microsoft kindof have spoilt me with these kind of surprises before so there wasn’t really much outrage left to use.
The program to fix the situation was Acronis Disk Director-> recovery expert, at the “complete setting” and waiting for a while. Some other program found old changed partitions, if you arrive at this situation check for correct size/amount of empty space at your final solution. If you recover the wrong partition you will likely write over the deleted data in the partition table and loose file data as well.
Finally, if you get into serious trouble that has to do with partitioning, partition table corruption or other non hardware loss of data, I would like to recommend this guy from Denmark;
http://www.partitionsupport.com/index.html
His free utilities is in my experience the best and definetely safest tools there is for this situation, I had him send me .bat files for a much worse situation I had earlier on and it was a matter of hours before I had everything out of the computer, and then the problems with the fudged partitions fixed as well.
I also have decent experiences with the people and their program at
I of course had a complete backup of my data, but still this was a bit of a wake up to me, Fdisk is evil in my book, forever.
Sully
#35
Please help:sad: I tried to install some more ram to my system this morning which it wouldnt accept and now my harddisk with all my 3d on it (4 years worth) is saying “file system corrupt” when I try to access it and in the properties for this drive its saying the disk is empty…It looks like the new ram has damaged my harddisks file system…Is this fixable ive just been trying to find some software to access the drive but theres so much out there and I dont want to cause any further damage just in case the problem Im having is fixable…
fasteez
#36
i dont know about your hard drive partitionning
if you have an empty space ton install a temporary windows
of if you have a way to brought your disk into a friend computer
there’s a soft called getbackdata for ntfs (runtime software www.runtime.org )
that works quite fine. it helps me restore about 6GB of disappeared
partitions ( no more MFT -__- ) so dont get hopeless
theres a demo on the website, but its limited in term of Bytes that can be restored.
but if your really in a hurry you can find a way on the donkey…
sorry for saying this coz its not quite good, i know.
if an admin find this misplaced he can delete this sentence of course.
peace
sebtatut
#39
Very nice list… needs to be updated(refreshed) though… some nice info about NAS and DAS could, also, be really useful.
Cheers and a nice job indeed.
