Best value 8 bay RAID 5

[Bob Zelin]

I unfortunately cannot answer this question. I never heard of “cheap” 2K DPX freelancers. These are the most expensive jobs, with the most expensive freelancers, doing the top work.

three internal modern SATA drives inside your MAC Pro stripped RAID 0 will do over 300MB/sec.

Bob Zelin

[Toby Tomkins]

Hi Bob,

I know, its wrong isn’t it! I should be getting paid more! A lot of my work is film based (mostly Super 16mm) and RED. Believe it or not I’m working on a micro-budget 35mm short soon (free stock and cheap camera rental with a great deal from Technicolor), and that’ll be a 2K DI finish that I’m doing FOR FREE (none of the crew are being paid, but most of us have worked together before and we believe in the project and love working with film). Anyway, rant over, I’m looking for a RAID 5 set up so that I can have some redundancy. I might be getting a feature contract soon (RED) to edit and grade and will need to guarantee deliverable dates. My budget for storage is unfortunately under £1000. I’m sure it can be done!

Best,

Toby

[Liam Wall]

Hi Toby

I know where you are coming from as I have had to make a few DAS on a tight budget. The EdgeStore DAS801T 8 Bay is an ok unit but the write speed is not that great and I also had some compatibility issues with 1TB drives in it. (This might have been resolved with a firmware update my advice would be check there web site) I am attaching an AJA system test from the MAC that has this unit attached to it.

Config is

Sonnet Tempo X4E
EdgeStore DAS801T 8 Bay
8x Seagate 500Gb
Raid 0
The raid is half full.

As you can see the write speed is not that great maxing out at 123 MB/s I believe this is to do with the SATA II Port multiplier chipset within this unit.

What you might want to do is talk to some UK based Media system resellers and they could give you some options and advise.

PS I am UK based as well.

[Toby Tomkins]

Hi Liam,

I think the low write speeds might be because of the controller. I presume you’re using 2 of the controller’s ports? (as opposed to all 4). For 8 drives in RAID 0 this seems very slow, but I don’t know how fast those 500GB drives are (do you have any single drive benchmarks?).

Thanks for your advice. Can you recommend any UK based media systems suppliers? (I assumed it would be cheaper to DIY it)

Best,

Toby

[Liam Wall]

Hi Toby

I was shocked when I saw the write speed but no the controller is not the problem. The reason I know this is we use to have the 500Gb drives in a ProAVIO Editbox EB8-PM unit which gave us a good 300+ read/write in a raid 0 on this controller in this MAC. I had to do a bit of a move around as we originally got the edgestore unit for a MAC PRO 8 Core HD editing station but found that once I had built the raid I was getting the poor write speeds so moved the unit on to are SD system.

There are a lot of good suppliers out there like Boxer.co.uk, videorescue.co.uk, Jigsaw24.com to name a few who could give you advice and recommendations on different products of what could work for you. But yes the DIY route is always cheaper but be ready for any bumps in the road if you have any problems but hey what is the COW and Google for.
If you do want to DIY it you might want to have a look at a company called WorldSpan Communications LTD @ https://www.Span.com which sell parts and fully built systems they might be able to help.

Best

Liam

[Toby Tomkins]

Thanks Liam. I’ll look into those vendors. I also think a 4.5TB 3 disk raid 0 (3x 1.5TB) with a 4TB backup (2x2TB) would be very cheap and fairly redundant (time machine backup at lunch and day close). That way I’m looking at 330MB/s read/write, good enough for 2K DPX workflow and ProRes 4444 (quickly becoming my new favourite) a well as having a 6hr interval backup. Not as good as Raid 5 bit almost half the price (almost half).

What do you think?

Toby

[Liam Wall]

Hi Toby

If that works for your workflow it should be fine. You might want to look at Enterprise Class HD, as some come with a 5 year warranties if the worst should happen.

Best

Liam