Firewire Storage

[Tim Langston]

Thanks for the suggestions Marco, the drives will definitly be in a external enclosure, I have two towers with all the SCSI’s in now, which I can take one and use for the SATA drives, each tower holds nine drives. I’m looking at the Barracuda ST3400832AS, looks like they’re a little cheaper than the hitachi.

How’s the Sonnet Tempo-X eSATA8?

I’d wait for the 500GB Seagate’s but it looks like I better build this ASAP.

Tim

Tim Langston
Cryin’ Out Loud Productions
Fort Wayne, IN
http://www.colproductions.com

[Lawrence Marshall]

I’ve tested the Sonnet eSATA Tempo quite extensively against the Firmtek 4-port external card, using the Hitachi-250 gig drives, the Seagate 400-gig drives, and the new Hitachi 500-gig drives. Both cards performed about the same… the Firmtek was just a *tad* faster than the Sonnet on the reads and writes, but it was a minimal improvement. I went with the Sonnet because I wanted 8 SATA ports, and the Firmtek currently maxes out at four.

Be aware of something VERY important with the Sonnet eSATA Tempo cards: the card with 8 external SATA ports DOES NOT FIT IN SLOT 4 OF THE G5!! There is a part of the card near the back that interferes with a power connector on the Apple motherboard. Sonnet knows this, others have *painfully* discovered this for themselves. So if Slot 4 is your only open slot for a SATA card, do NOT buy Sonnet’s 8-port external card. The Sonnet eSATA 4×4 *will* fit in Slot 4, however.

I wanted 8 ports, so I bought the Sonnet eSATA 4×4 (four internal, four external). I had my neighbor cut out a little section of the mounting plate (looks completely professional, like it was supposed to be cut out!), and I’m running four cables from the internal connectors on the card out the back of the G5. Add four cables to the external ports, and I now have all 8 connectors from a card that lives in Slot 4.

Larry M

[Bob Zelin]

I use both the Firmtek and the Sonnet 8 port. In both cases, I stick the Kona 2 product in slot 4 and either the Firmtek or Sonnet in Slot 2 or 3, so there is never an issue that “it does not fit”.

If you are doing 8 bit or 10 bit SDI or DVCProHD, you will get spectacular results with only 2 drives (Hitachi and Seagates are both fine). However, if you want to do UNCOMPRESSED 8 or 10 BIT HD, you MUST MUST MUST use all 8 drives, and you are stuck with the Sonnet. You may find that you have trouble getting all 8 drives to mount with the Sonnet, and this is only due to the eSATA connection, which you have to play with sometimes to get the corner ports to mount. (Don’t worry, you can do this with power on) – but this gets frustrating, when you have all 8 drives stripped together as RAID 0, and you see nothing mount on your desktop, when only one (which one ?) of the drives did not mount. It can be a challange. Either way, the Firmtek WILL NOT DO UNCOMPRESSED HD due to the limited # of ports on the card.

I still feel the safest way to do uncompressed HD is with the HUGE U320RX (or Apple XServe RAID, and Walter says the Medea FC array).

I am urging my clients to choose SATA over FW800, but many still choose FW800.

Bob Zelin

[Jeremy Garchow]

I feel like I should chime in on this thread as a contributor to this forum. Please let me preface by saying that I do not mean to start a forum war and I am not trying to be difficult. I don’t have as much experience as Bob, Ramona, and Marco and you should respect their comments highly, but I do have something to say about my SATA experience. It really depends on how much time you want to devote to down time and fixing what’s wrong. Read into Bob’s post about the non mounting drives, now imagine that you are under a tight deadline and the client is sitting their looking at their watch thinking “am I paying for this time?” while you figure out which of the eight ports is not quite seated, and restarts, and try-agains, and all you need to do is output your beautifully finished 30 second spot out to tape and get it to distribution or fedex in an hour. Don’t get me wrong, SATA performance is totally surprising and I think one day in the not so distant future, SATA raids will be the ‘it’ storage solution. If you don’t mind some weirdness and supporting your own hardware with no one to call, I say go for it. you can’t match the price/performance. I had a 4 disk SATA RAID with a HighPoint rocketraid card (it was before sonnet had even the 4+4 let alone the eSATA) and I had all sorts of problems that almost kicked my ass into not working for this particular group of folks again. I had two rocketraid cards melt on me and their support was awful. it took almost a month to get a new card to replace the first faulty card. Much to my chagrin, I had to buy another one in the meantime and that one ended up going bad as well. I finally got the replacement and decided that I was going to look into an external RAID that was built professionally and also professionally supported because I was fed up. I got a small 5 disk 4Gb fibre raid and have not looked back. It works great, handles 720p UC HD in RAID 3 and is totally expandable into future systems. That being said, maybe Sonnet’s support is much better than HighPoint’s and perhaps their SATA cards work much better. I don’t know what kind of in house engineering support you have, but I am an owner operator and I have myself to take care of my machines. Buying a prebuilt, pretested RAID has been a great move for me. It hurt a little more up front in the pocketbook, but has saved me soooo much time and stress, and as you know time is money. Also, I have the comfort of knowing that if something goes wrong I make a phone call and can have a brand new shiny RAID or a replacement drive in the morning if something catastrophic happens.

Please take this for what it’s worth as my story is probably unique. Many people have great experiences with SATA Raids.

Whichever route you choose, I hope it brings success.

Jeremy

[Tim Langston]

I’m starting to think it might be wise to replace my SCSI ultra 160’s with ultra 320’s. No new controller to buy, no new cables, just drives.

Now that being said……would it be better to have 10 73GB drive or 6 146GB drives?

Thanks, Monday’s coming soon, I lost sleep over this last night…..I think a Tylenol PM or two will do the trick tonight.

Tim

Tim Langston
Cryin’ Out Loud Productions
Fort Wayne, IN
http://www.colproductions.com

[Harley Michailuck]

[JeremyG] “while you figure out which of the eight ports is not quite seated, and restarts, and try-agains”

First off, I have yet to see a RAID stop working due to a SATA cable coming loose. Normally, if the SATA RAID shows up on the desktop, you’re good to go.

If by chance it doesn’t show up, go into the Apple RAID disk utility and you’ll quickly see which drive is missing and therefore which cable connection is the problem (you do have your cables and ports numbered, don’t you?). There is no need for restarts or powering down, from what I understand SATA and e-SATA connections can be changed hot. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.

Best,
Harley

Harley Michailuck
Brass Orchid Post fx
Saskatoon, SK Canada

https://www.brassorchid.com

[Marco Solorio]

I think your situation, as unlucky as it was, was in fact unique, just as people have unique problems with any other RAID system. I’m still using said HighPoint RocketRAID in a system and it’s still working perfectly after all the time. Never a problem with it, other than purposely unmounting the RAID, turning off the RAID and the controller card sounding an alarm.

With any system, things can go wrong. Sorry to hear you had bad luck with yours!

Marco Solorio  |  OneRiver Media