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Building a Better Raid…Hopefully
I’m in the process of upgrading my bay with either the KONA 2 or LH card. In terms of a suitable RAID 5 solution,
I’d like to buy five SATA drives, an enclosure, host card and do-it-myself. One question before I take on the task:
When building a RAID, can I mix and match hard drive brands and capacities. For example, can I RAID together two Hitachi 7k250 250gb drives with two Seagate 7200.8 300gb drives?My immediate use for this uncompressed system will be to post a TV doc shot on Beta-SP. The LH is better suited for analog capture, but it would be nice to have the upconvert capabilities of the K2. How good does Beta-SP or even DVCAM footage look upconverted to HD via the KONA 2?
Current system: Dual 2.0 GHZ G5, 2G RAM
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4 Replies
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Jeff –
you are crazy. You have Beta SP material, and you want to do a “build it yourself system” so you can save some money. SATA is VERY reliable, and you will hate the Highpoint card which offers RAID 5. Forget the RAID – get an AJA IO LA, or the Kona LH, get a Firmtek Seritek 2 port card that comes for free with the 2 bay SATA enclosure and get any 2 matching SATA drives that you mention above, stripe them at RAID 0, and do your job. You can do 10 bit uncompressed with no problems. And you can get larger 500 Gig drives, to give yourself a lot of storage. The whole damn thing will cost you about $1000, and if you get the Firmtek, there is no software to install.Bob Zelin
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Hi Bob
[Bob Zelin] “and you will hate the Highpoint card which offers RAID 5”
Did you mean love or hate?Have you tried this card, the new sonnet looks pretty darn good.
Regards
Olivier Jean
Video Sales Consultant
Apple Certified Trainer Final Cut Pro 5
Powermedia Systems
Sydney Australia -
Jeff,
Mixing different capacity drives will result in the total GB avaiable defined as the amount of the smallest drive times the number of drives you will stripe as a raid.
So for example if you have (2) 250 gb and (2) 300 gb drives using simple addition this equals = 1100 gb however because you mixed 250 gb with 300 gb drives then when all the drives are striped as a raid the two 300 gb drives will only offer 250gb of storage so now the raid’s total storage is 250 gb x 4= 1000gb of storage.
Do you actually have a request to deliver the show in HD from the SD master?
If not then disregard needing any upconversion board because the point is moot.
I personally avoid mixing different brands when stripping a raid but that’s only my own preference.
Tony Salgado
PS- Thanks Bob for the heads up on the firmtek gear
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The new Sonnet card looks INCREDIBLE, and I am waiting to get my hands on one. I have read so so things about the PCIe Highpoint, and have had bad experiences with Highpoint in the past, and since it’s internal port only, I will pass completely on the Highpoint, and look only at the Sonnet (until Firmtek releases their card, which is not out yet).
Bob Zelin
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