Hard Drive brand

[Michael Sacci]

[JeremyG] “Raid1? Highly doubtful” that was my point

[Debbi Mita]

[msacci] “Shane, what would the CalDigit get me for twice the money of a Sonnet P500 and 750GB Seagate drives? I can put that together for under $2200. Since I already have the card.”

We have been running several CalDigit S2VR HD units in our Mac Pro. Performance is very stable and the entire system run smoothly.

Sonnet’s box is great, but you may need more drives (multiple boxes) to support your workflow. That means you may end up to pay more and you need more CPU and memory resouce to control your drives. Bob has a great review, you may want to check it out.

let me put down their sales pitch (copy from their site) and my own experience.

1. CalDigit has its own GUI (software) to monitor whole RAID, fan, temperature, email, voice notification, password protection…etc. Of course, you may or may not want to use these fancy functions, but again, you are dealing with multiple drives, not single drive, you have no way to monitor your drives or case in disk utility. this is kinda inconvenient, so with CalDigit’s software you can access the raid and monitor the status.

2. CalDigit’s S2VR HD can do hardware raid 0, 1, jbod and 10, but sonnet or other port multiplier box is only a non-raid sata box which give you nothing but individual drives. no raid function at all. That means CalDigit’s unit has built-in RAID engine. and their GUI can access this engine and config different raid levels.

3. They provide 3 year warranty.

4. Excellnet tech support and single vendor support – this is the most important to us. all we need just give them a call. their professional support guys did trouble shooting with us, very helpful and patiently.

5. another great advantage is their modular and industrial desing –
swappable fan, swappable power supply, server grade power supply, the case looks very sturdy and professional.

anyway, if you are looking for a pro gear for video editing, CalDigit’s S2VR is very inexpensive.
I hope this helps.

[Jeremy Garchow]

There you go, that’s why you pay a little extra.

Thanks, debbimita

[Michael Sacci]

[debbimita] “CalDigit’s S2VR HD can do hardware raid 0, 1, jbod and 10”

Is anyone doing anything other than Raid 0 on anything like this for video? It sounds like a great feature but I don’t think it is being used in our world, I maybe wrong. Using Apple Raid I still get over 240Mbps read speeds.

I think this goes along with the build your own system vs. buying from a VAR debate. There are benefits and security in buying from the VAR but there is more food on your table if you are ABLE to build your own system. 🙂 I like food!

Last year I built a HD FCP system that has worked great, the only draw back was I needed to swap out HDs with a project of multiple concerts (8) with each having 6 cameras. I needed to use 3 sets of 4 300GB drives but only had a single Fusion 400 enclosure, It was a bit of a hassle but it worked great.

I

[Uli Plank]

Sorry for pouring some water in the wine, but I had just two days ago a Seagate Barracuda (under 2 years) old die on me. I would never put my business on risk by using unprotected RAID 0 without a clever backup strategy.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.

[Michael Sacci]

But that is kind of what I have been ask, but not very well. How are you PROTECTED? My protection are the tapes but as I’m moving into the tapeless world this is a big concern. how do you balance performance with protection?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Uli Plank] “Sorry for pouring some water in the wine…I would never put my business on risk by using unprotected RAID 0 without a clever backup strategy.”

You just don’t know until it happens to you. It happened to me and I went into debt to buy a RAID 3 system. 2 or so years later, I have made that money back no problem and my raid runs and runs and runs, drive failure or not.

Jeremy

[Michael Sacci]

I hope I’m not beating a dead horse here, but people are say this CalDigit has protection, I’m asking, can it actually give you protection if the world of video editing where you need read speed. Apple disk utility can give you raid 1 or 10 also but I don’t think a Sata system can handle it speed wise.

Raid 3 has always sounded like a great compromise but it seems like you start getting into +$10000 solutions to get that.

I’m I correct here or is my thinking all messed up.

[David Roth weiss]

If you’ve got the money they’ve got the speed and some protection. If you’ve got lots of money they’ve lots of speed and lots of protection.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Caldigit does not have enough speed to handle multiple HD streams in protected mode, no.

Check out this discussion:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862764&threadid=862738&pview=t

It includes a bunch of info about backing up raid0. Concerning RAID3, You could get the Cipirico 4105 for $5,000+. It’s not the cheapest, but it runs in high speed, high protection, and great support. You could also check into the GRAID fibre version (i think it’s called GRAID PRO). It’s cheaper than Ciprico, but runs raid3.

Jeremy