Advice on building my first RAID

[Robert Houllahan]

Enterprise drives alone are going to run $1500.00 not including enclosure or card. Do you have a eSata enclosure now? port multiplier? I think Sonnett tech has a Thunderbolt adapter but anything Thunderblt is going to break your bank right now.

-Rob-

Robert Houllahan
Director / Colorist
Cinelab Inc.
http://www.cinelab.com

MAHC-PRO 6-Core 3X GTX285 20Tb SAS Wave Panel Panny 11UK SDI Plasma.

[Chris Jones]

[Robert Houllahan] “Do you have a eSata enclosure now?”

I have 2 copies of the film’s DPX files (24TB total) on Western Digital 1.5TB internal drives and used a eSATA dock: Voyager Q Quad Interface.

I have to be very careful with them, but so far it has worked very well and it saved a lot of money at a time when I was spending a lot on scanning.

I’m also starting to look into the more expensive setup you recommended 6 months ago – if it’s possible to put together a scaled down version.

The ATTO R680 sounds reliable. I only have 1 free PCI slot though (after I remove the eSATA card) so I can’t use a multiplier. Do I need a multiplier with the R680? By the way… what exactly does a multiplier do? 🙂

Would something like this be possible?

R680 $1000.00
8 Disk Enclosure $500.00
4 2TB drives $800.00 (to start)

Thanks again for your help!

[Robert Houllahan]

The 680 is a great card But I don;t know if you really need it for a 8-bay box. Highpoint has some newer SAS cards I would look at which might allow you to stretch the budget a bit and fill the casr with drives.

-Rob-

Robert Houllahan
Director / Colorist
Cinelab Inc.
http://www.cinelab.com

MAHC-PRO 6-Core 3X GTX285 20Tb SAS Wave Panel Panny 11UK SDI Plasma.

[Paul Provost]

The rr 2722 comes bundled with the sans dig 8 bay and cables at newegg.com, cheap.
Both ports on the card go to the enclosure, So you are left with fw800 for backup. Bummer.
You will easily get 650mb+ read/write with 8 – 7200rpm drives In raid 5 (I have this setup and it is fast for the money)
No tbolt on Mac pro.

https://www.postandbeam.tv
grade and finish @ post + beam
https://www.facebook.com/pages/post-beam/137967176232067

[Margus Voll]

Have you went here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/raid

Bob is good with these things.

He is also very direct if the idea is bad or does not work.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu

[Chris Jones]

I had been leaning toward the Highpoint 2722 setup but after discovering the RAID forum on Creative Cow yesterday and reading through it a bit – I found a lot of dissatisfaction with the Highpoint product.

“I won’t contribute to the many Rocketraid trials & tribulations (except to say we would never have made it to orbit with this rocket)”

“Highpoint has no support and a confusing web interface which you’re aware of already.”

“You have already seen what happens when you stick with the Highpoint.”

Since I’ve never set up a RAID before and my budget forces me to set it up myself, I’m a bit nervous to start with something which might prove problematic.

I did call both Highpoint and ATTO to see what the tech support was like; there was no question that ATTO would be able to help me out if I ran into problems. Highpoint I’m not so sure.

I’ll post over in the Cow’s RAID area but if anyone else here has anything good to say about the Highpoint setup I’d be interested to hear since I’ll be using it with Resolve and people here understand my needs.

Thanks again!

[David Roth weiss]

[Chris Jones] “Since I’ve never set up a RAID before and my budget forces me to set it up myself, I’m a bit nervous to start with something which might prove problematic. “

You should be nervous Chris.

You’re dealing hardware that will be at the very heart of your day to day editing operations, and you want it perform in a manner that will provide virtually mission-critical protection, but you’re trying to avoid paying the toll to get there.

If you’re a professional working with 12Tb of DPX files, you should be charging enough to completely pay for a “proper” professional RAID solution with just 2 to 3 weeks of paid work. If you’re not able to fund such a purchase with the work you’re doing and the rates you’re charging, you have only two alternatives:

1) Raise your rates.
2) Consider a less expensive attached storage solution (not RAID-5).

A properly working hardware-based RAID-5 is terrific, because it will offer vast amounts of storage, high throughput, and some peace of mind. But, having all three of the above comes at a price, and it’s the peace of mind that you will lose if you cheap out, either by going it alone, or by buying cheap components, or both.

So, ultimately you’re going to have to make a decision to choose what’s most important to you: is it storage space and storage speed (throughput), or the peace of mind that only a proper RAID-5 can provide? Only you can answer that question…

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com
http://www.ProMax.com
Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Chris Jones]

Thanks for the good advice. Unfortunately I’m not getting paid for what I’m doing (it would be nice). I’m working on my own 16mm feature so It’s all coming out of my pocket.

Right now I’m just paying to learn… down the road of course hopefully it will pay off 🙂

[David Roth weiss]

Well, in that case, you might want to consider saving your dough by going with a RAID-0 solution, and using cheap firewire drives as backup, keeping in mind that
RAID-5 still requires backup.

So, in your situation, there’s no real advantage to paying extra bucks for RAID-5 that’s not going to give you the real peace of mind you deserve, which really only comes at a price.

Make sense?

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com
http://www.ProMax.com
Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Margus Voll]

Yes have really big drive that can hold all your raid 0 in time machine and your half way.

If needed have Backblaze as your offline backup. Ok it makes only 21 gigs a day and cost 5 dollars a month but it helps if your time machine fails.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu