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To setup an optimal, dedicated RAID system to store video, you should consider RAID 5. RAID 5 strikes a great balance between streaming read/write performance and reliability. However, RAID 5 requires at least 3 dedicated HDD's and is best suited for between 4 and 6 HDD's. Using only 3 drives is inefficient and more than six drives can be too risky because you only have a singe drive failure tolerance. If you require more than 6 drives, consider RAID 6. However, if you only have 2 drives to store your video your only reliable option is RAID 1. For RAID 5, Identiv recommends a relatively large stripe block size like 64K.
Database Volume RAID Options
To setup and optimal, dedicated RAID system to store your SQL database locally, you should choose either RAID 1 or RAID 10. RAID 0 is not recommended because a single drive failure will cause loss of the entire database. If you choose RAID 1, there are no options to consider. But if you choose RAID 10, there is the additional consideration of stripe block size. Because SQL transactions tend to be smaller in nature, it is important to optimize as much as possible for smaller transfer sizes in order to see a performance improvement. It is not possible to specify a perfect size, but Identiv recommends starting with smaller stripe block sizes rather than larger ones to get the best performance.
Performance Tuning
Some additional Windows settings can have some significant additional performance potential.
Data Compression
Turn this setting off.
File Indexing
Turn this setting off.
File Defragmenting
Severe file fragmenting can seriously degrade storage performance. Identiv recommends setting up file defragmentation to run once a week (preferably at low system load times)
File System Allocation Block Sizes
Internal Identiv testing has not shown any performance gains by choosing a non-default file system allocation block size. Your experience may differ, but at the current time we do not recommend any changes to the default Windows file system allocation block size settings.
Volume Cache Flushing Option:
Once the RAID volumes have been created and a file system created on a RAID volume, there is one last setting which can dramatically improve performance on the volume: the file system write buffer flushing. This setting controls whether Windows aggressively tries to keep file system related information synchronized between what is stored in the relatively fast RAM and what is stored in the relatively slower permanent storage system. To keep the data between the two in sync, the data in RAM needs to be written out to the RAID system as often as possible in case there is a sudden and unexpected loss of power. In the case of sudden power loss, any information that was kept in RAM but not committed to the permanent storage system (i.e. the RAID drives) will be lost forever. However, this strategy to protect against potential data loss comes at the price of performance when the system is under heavy loads. But sometimes it is the cache buffer flushing which is actually contributing to the heavy system workloads. This means that one of the of the performance improving options for systems with heavy workloads is to disable this aggressive cache flushing behavior.
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