COW Reviews: CalDigit: S2VR HD

[Jeremy Garchow]

Sorry for being bullheaded and playing devils advocate, but even when the controller died, Bob, you still managed to move the drives and get the data off to another array, and then moved that data to a backup array. Reliability of drives today across the board are pretty good. It’s not that issue I am concerned about, it’s just when it fails (even if it’s 2-3 years from now) it’s a lot of work to get it all back. If a drive fails in RAID 0, there no amount of drive moving that can be done. By the time you have the two arrays, one master and one backup, you could buy yourself a 4105 with RAID 3 that will do 1080i with 5 drives in redundant mode. No?

I really want to buy cheap RAIDs, really. I just can’t psych myself up to do so.

Jeremy

[Nikolas T]

I have both Caldigit S2VR HD and HUGE U320. And I think both HUGE and Caldigit are excellent storage.

Caldigit has RAID 0,1, JBOD only. And HUGE 4105 or U320R has RAID3. But in order to capture and edit 10 bit uncompressed HD with data protection, you have to set it to RAID 3 TURBO which lose 60% of capacity. Say, if your HUGE 4105 is 2.5TB, you’ll get only 1TB in RAID 3 Turbo. And you have to spend $7,500 for the 4105 itself and ATTO FC card.

I believe you can capture and edit 10 bit 1080/59.94i in RAID10 mode by striping two S2VR HD. Even you lose 60% of disk space by doing so, but you only spend less than $6,000 for 2TB usable capacity.

[Shane Ross]

I am in Walter’s court. I use RAID 0 on my editing arrays, and back up the footage to a cheaper SATA unit I happen to have (the one I built intending to use for editing). This way, if the raid fails, I only have to spend a day (or overnight) copying the footage back to the main unit once it is up and running.

But I can see you wanting that protection. I myself am skeptical of that type of Raid. How can 1 drive maintain the media info from the other 4, and recover the footage once a replacment is had? Never had a failure, but I wouldn’t want to test it.

But that is me. I like the CalDigit units a lot, and I still want to get use out of the old SATA case I had, so it is the elegant solution for me. And Walter apparently.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Jeremy Garchow]

Nioklas, thanks for the math break down. It helps, but as has been mentioned before, the time lost in ‘down time’ could be the deal breaker. It’s hard to calculate because you can’t buy it off of a shelf.

Although, you guys are ever more convincing about RAID 0. I have a couple of over night render war stories with RAID 0 setups that aren’t for the meek.

Shane, Raid3 is quite logical once you know how it works. As with most things in computers it’s all ones and zeros:

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/146/855135?

I hope I am not coming across as flippant, I am just trying to gather opinions and push for cheaper RAID 3 is all.

Jeremy

[Walter Biscardi]

[JeremyG] “Although, you guys are ever more convincing about RAID 0. I have a couple of over night render war stories with RAID 0 setups that aren’t for the meek.”

Keep in mind that all of my work is in DVCPro HD at the moment so having a FW800 RAID backup device means I will have zero downtime in the event of a failure of the CalDigit SATA array. If that drive goes down, I won’t even need to copy the footage over, just keep editing if I don’t have the time.

I could even have two CalDigits mirroring each other and I believe that would still come in cheaper than same priced RAID 3 arrays.

Not trying to convince you Jeremy because RAID 3 is a definite advantage and comfort factor for a lot of people. Just trying to tell you how my mentality has definitely changed over the past 6 months or so. Heck 12 months ago I didn’t even believe in SATA period and was advocating Fibre as the only way to do HD. things are changing rapidly in the storage world, just look at the new HD 4:4:4 from CalDigit. Stripe two of those together for around 900MB/s.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
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[Jeremy Garchow]

Cool, thanks Walter.

Jeremy

[Ken Hon]

Aloha Jeremy,

I built 2 Sonnet 4.5 TB 10 drive systems and one is the backup for the other. I’m using Retrospect to do an incremental backup of files and wrote a script to do it. You can schedule it or just click on it and it’ll back up anything new. We backup at the end of the day or during breaks in editing. And the back up doesn’t take so long cause the 2 RAIDS are fast. That way, we have zero down time if something goes bad. I’ve also got a 2 spare SATA drives of the same vintage to swap in case of a failure and a 1 TB firewire backup for doubling critical work along with 3 firewire drives that I rotate the system drive on using CarbonCopy. We’ve also got a 200 GB tape drive, but don’t use that so much except to archive some finished projects. Anyway, you can be ultra paranoid and still work on the cheaper end of things.

Aloha,

Ken