-
best options for expanding storage and back ups
Hi Folks,
Firstly what an amazing resource this site is…. biggup to all who contribute.
I was about to buy a drobo today until I read a post on this site re – sohotank and drive configuring.
Problem is I am a director/editor and while teccy enough I’m just not up to speed on raids and arrays etc.
I usually work out of facility houses – so no need up till now to learn this stuff. Now I’m working out of my own studio and keeping clients media on drives. I am eating up terrabyte drives this way (not to mention all the power sockets). Today two old drives failed and I lost valuable media – I know, I know back up, back up, but if I were backing up old drives I’d have dozens and dozens of drives on my shelf and clients don’t want to pay for two drives.
Its all kind of exploded. So I have to address this.I cannot just keep buying lacie external drives….
Guidance would really help….
My setup:
Two machines –
1. my MAC tower – functions as – edit suite, soundmixing, CGI station and recording and soundmixing software.
2. Mac laptop – functions as – all admin and script writing, legals, contracts accounts etc.
Ideally I’d love to have all the edit suite internal drives empty and copy onto them the projects I’m currently working on only. Then archive off the system as they finish and get delivered.
My idea was –
Main mac: 2x2tb of gdrive (not dual g-raid) for this purpose and having these backing up to Drobo.
Laptop : 1tb of gdrive and backing up to the same Drobo.Any other ideas –
Questions:
where can I learn about configuring drives myself, raids etc – it seems very complicated – restoring etc
Am I right in thinking raids are only protecting you if drives fail – well if I’m backing up any way whats the point of raid. ALso am I safer backing up single drives – what about the raids electronics and controllers – eg if drobo controllers go down am I not in the regardless of drives ‘proverbial’
Thoughts please:
Also…..All these electric socket plugs ……… drobo would give me 8-12 tb with only one socket…..
Help….I’m happy to read up and learn about this but where do I start.
Thanks in advance….
-
10 Replies
-
Hey Frank.
What’s your budget like? Having that information will go a long ways to figure out what you need. Also are you just needing something to back up on? No need for speed? RAID’s are actually pretty easy to deal with once they’re set up. I’d be happy to help you out, regardless of if you end up buying our solution or someone else’s. I’ve seen people use many single drive external enclosures, but that becomes a standard complaint after awhile & you’ll always hear “I’ve got all these drives….all over the place, time to consolidate them”.
Tell us what’s up, we’re here to help.
Jonathan Schilling | Sales & Marketing Manager
RAIDON-USA Technology
STARDOM Storage by RAIDON
15356 East Valley Blvd., Suite B
City of Industry, CA 91746
Tel: 626-333-7888
http://www.stardom-usa.comCOW LEADER – Stardom Storage Forum
-
Well obviously as reasonable as possible – ideally not much more that 1500 euros(I’m based in Europe) which is approx 2000 dollars. But Reliability is key here. I dont mind slow-ish backups they can run overnight but I cannot afford to loose data again – I’m shooting TV projects on large budgets and clients commercial projects (again large budgets) on cards – no rushes on tape sitting on the shelf for when the S-one-TEE hits the fan and a drive goes down.
I have the internal mac drives for speed for editing. I can keep the current working projects on the MAC internal drives if necessary and maybe overspill onto a external hard drive like a g-raid. Then archive the finished projects maybe onto another drive or array and then backup.
I’d love a really secure backup and an expandable system, ideally that 2 macs can access. I only have a wireless router no ethernet cable setup, maybe i could upgrade that to a faster one….
I dont have large enough amounts of data for a server.
on the Laptop max I need 2tb
on the Edit suite – approx 6 tb expandable for future proofing for working editing and keeping recent;ly closed projects, then maybe a total of 8-10tb for backups.
Now I know this will cost more that 2000 dollars but I’m happy to start small but smart and expand to this.
-
Frank,
Hope it’s ok that I ask more questions.
Does the storage need to be accessed by 2 computers at the same time, or 1 at a time?
What kind of machine do you have. What kind camera is being used? What is the codec? What is the final product? How long is the footage and how many streams of playback?
Jonathan Schilling | Sales & Marketing Manager
RAIDON-USA Technology
STARDOM Storage by RAIDON
15356 East Valley Blvd., Suite B
City of Industry, CA 91746
Tel: 626-333-7888
http://www.stardom-usa.comCOW LEADER – Stardom Storage Forum
-
Okay computers – a. mac, intel 2×2.26 quad cores, 6gb ram. Second is a laptop (purely for admin)
Editing in FCP7
Dont need to access storage at same time.Re editing: Cameras can be anything from RED, Panasonic 720p varicam, Canon 5D, EX3. I tend to offline in prores LT (or as fast a res as I can get to work with.) Non of it is for live broadcast so usually I offline then relink or reconform via deck, color grade via apple color, any CGI or touch up in After Effects or Nuke, then I usually take a quicktime file to a facilities house for finishing.
If its a low budget I’ll finish here and output to tape, DVD or quicktime.
I dont need fibre optic speed or anything like that, anything that needs that is usually high enough budget that I do it all at a high end facilities house with serious support.
So firewire speeds are enough.
Longest duration I will be working on will be 90 min. A big drama doc coming up, shooting on Varicam 720p, offlining at DV resolution on a prores codec. Average durations are 5mins to 1hour.
Havent run RED through the workflow yet will be doing that in the next few weeks though.
So its really a good backingup and archiving system and of course reliability and making sure I don’t loose any data through drives blowing up etc etc…..
Oh I am also finding that the longer my programme length the more often the playback in FCP stalls and I have to lower playback res….would be nice to fix that up (is that a beefier graphics card)
-
Here’s what I’ve ended up with Storage-wise, if it helps.
Mac Pro Internal HDD’s
Bay 1- System Drive, 1TB WD Caviar Black 32mb cache
Bay’s 2, 3 & 4- Media Drives, 2TB WD Caviar Black 64mb cache. All 3 HDD’s in one 6TB RAID-0. 2 TB HDD’s at ~$150 EA.Externals
LaCie 4Big 8TB in RAID-0 (will be switched to RAID-5 soon) connected via E-SATA, for backup’s (it’s not really slow). I originally bought the 12TB 4Big but due to back-order status and my own time constraints, I had to go with the 8TB. *sadface* 12 TB- $1500.A few 1TB Lacie d2 Quadra’s. Sitting around, I should probably spin them up.
Several 1TB bare internal HDD’s (some drive-pairs in RAID-0) used with a 2.5″ & 3.5″ HDD Dock via E-SATA. Cheap and very convenient. $70-
https://www.frys.com/product/5807613?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PGGood luck with your storage quest!
-
Frank –
I do not know how to help you. I know what you need, but you don’t want to pay for it. There are several wonderful manufacturers that advertise on Creative Cow, that have SAS port expanders on their RAID boxes. This will allow you to daisy chain up to 128 disk drives, or 8 16bay chassis on to one host controller card. There are several companies that make this, and they advertise right here on Creative Cow. Using Hitachi 3TB SATA drives, you can have 384 TB
of storage (is that enough for you ?). But this is not going to cost
$2000 US. Not even for a single box. The host controller cards alone will cost you $1000 to make this happen.Bob Zelin
-
Frank,
See the banner on the left of this window for the STARDOM SOHOTANK ST8-U5, click it & check it out. (if it’s not there, refresh this screen & it’ll come up), or here’s the link:
SOHOTANK ST8-U5Cost breakdown is like this:
8 drive bays (you populate with hard drives) $699.00 USD
add a ATTO R680 card to your motherboards PCIe slot, cost about $1050.00 USD, add your own 3TB drives (pricing varies), RAID 6 usable capacity will be about 18TB formatted with RAID 6 performance of 830+ MB/s READ/WRITE, while it may end up being about $500 USD over your budget, it’s still close, it’s FAST & got RAID 6 dual parity protection. Although it’s DAS, or direct attached, it’s still a great field proven editing & storage solution.Jonathan Schilling | Sales & Marketing Manager
RAIDON-USA Technology
STARDOM Storage by RAIDON
15356 East Valley Blvd., Suite B
City of Industry, CA 91746
Tel: 626-333-7888
http://www.stardom-usa.comCOW LEADER – Stardom Storage Forum
-
Thanks a mill – great responses and ideas, I’m a newbie at this stuff – the arrays, raid and sas etc….
I love the sound of the sohotank solution….I think I’ve now gotta learn (google university) about sas expanders and raid etc…..
Are sohotank available in Europe…..
-
Hi Jon,
I have beefed up on raid, sas, sohotanks etc……think I’ve got the hang of it and the idea.
I love the sohotank solution – it looks amazing….
Question though lets say I invest in a 8bay/8port sas (which at the moment is overkill for me but I am also considering the future and data amassing) am I also wise to be backing that up to another array (JBOD) rather than raid purely as a safety backup or is this overkill….what I’m asking is – raid 6 will pretty much protect me disk failure wise (unless 3 drives fail together) but what if the sas card blows or the startanks electronics malfunction (or are there any electronics in it).
Secondly If I’m populating this with 3 tb drives I presume you’re talking about 7200rpm drives or are you talking about 5400rpm – surely I’m not going to get the speed youre talking about with the latter and I havent seen any 3tb 7200rpm drives on the market yet.
Question 3. Can sohotank and atto cards be got in Europe, if so where? I’m in Ireland.
-
Frank,
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, it was a busy weekend.
The ST8-U5 product is a DAS, or direct attached system. If you wanted to add another array for back up, you might want to consider perhaps a Fire Wire based back up, as you can only use 1 ST8-U5 per ATTO card, per PCIe slot. If you need to share you can do that through ethernet. If your dealing with large file size than you can use the ST8-U5 and “share the data over ethernet”.
We’d recommend using 7200 RPM SATA drives, I’d personally recommend going with Hitachi Ultrastar.
Contact Polar Graphics in the UK for a retailer near you.
https://www.polar-graphics.com/ I noted that “STARDOM” isn’t on their site yet, but I can assure you that if you contact Polar they will take care of you, (they’re a fairly new distributor for us).Hope that helps, any other questions, please feel free to ask.
Jonathan Schilling | Sales & Marketing Manager
RAIDON-USA Technology
STARDOM Storage by RAIDON
15356 East Valley Blvd., Suite B
City of Industry, CA 91746
Tel: 626-333-7888
http://www.stardom-usa.comCOW LEADER – Stardom Storage Forum
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up