Hard Drive brand

[Michael Sacci]

David, who is they?

Jeremy, G Raid Pro is FW 800 G Speed is the Fibre but thans for pointing me in that direction.

[Shane Ross]

First off, I have only worked on one system with Raid protection and that was an Avid Unity, and the cost of that goes far beyond what we are talking about here. Other than that, I have never ran a protected RAID. Always RAID 0, because I need the performance. Does Apple Xserve offer Raid 1? Yes. The drawback? You spend the money to fill up all the slots and only utilize one side…the other side is backup. Very expensive solution if you ask me.

How do I protect my footage? Well, I have the tapes, and with the P2 footage we have that backed up in 2 locations, on two sets of drive (yes, paranoid). BUT…what would I like to do? Because recapturing all that footage means renting a deck and spending another 2-3 days capturing…money down the drain. I’d like to have the main RAID for performance. Get the CalDigit HD and use that for editing. Then get an inexpensive SATA case that allows for drive swapping and get internal drives to back the footage up. Pseudo Raid 1 (just a manual way of doing it) but now I have my RAID for performance, and my footage backed up on the inexpensive enclosure. So if I lose footage, all I have to do is copy from the backups. Half a day, tops.

I’ll have to claim ignorance as to how Raid 3 or 5 work…how can one drive be a backup for the other 4. Sounds too sketchy to me, and I have yet to find someone explain it in a way that makes me feel comfortable with it as a solution (and I was at macworld where there were a dozen drive companies with RAID protection). If anyone who has that setup and actually experienced a failure could chime in, I’d appreciate it.

And thanks debbimita, I forgot about the GUI that e-mails you if a fan fails or any problem with a drive arises, so that you can back it up before it dies. That is a BIG plus.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Shane Ross]

Oh, sorry. Getting back to brand of HDs. I personally favor the Seagate 7200.10 series, and so do the CalDigit folk. However, in my home grown system I have Hitachi Deskstar 500GB drives. I haven’t had one drive from any manufacturer fail on me. Only an enclosure. The drives inside were fine. But by reputation I Favor the Seagates, then Hitachi.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[Debbi Mita]

talking about the backup and protection, just wanted to add my 2 cents here

4105 is 6,298.50+ 1295 for the host adapter
so the total investment for 4105 will be $76XX (for 2.5tb)
Caldigit’s 2.5tb is around 2999
so if buying one 4150, you can buy 2.5 S2VR HD 2.5TB
1 unit of 4105=2.5 units of s2vr hd

Hard disks fail too, but less. It’s all statistics : you have a certain risk that you lose data within x years.
The solution to this is redundancy, always have a physical BACKUP or RAID 1 (hardware RAID of course).

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=98&postid=862762

yes i have a very similar set up like walter’s but i am using caldigit’s DUO as back up device. it is much faster than FireWire, save my backup time.
also i can just buy the spare drives from caldigit when the drives are full…
you could systematically organize your work by drive sets without buying multiple units again and again.

Of course, it will be nicer if you have more RAID levels other than 0, 1, this may save some hard drive space to do redundancy.
But in reality, even RAID 6 cannot guarantee your data safe or “safer”.

Heat is death to hard drive, so how to keep drives cooler and run longer would be even more important than fancy RAID levels.

I found CalDigit’s S2VR and FireWire VR have excellent cooling system that
cool down the hard drives and entire unit. This quite important to all the external RAID or single drive, otherwise,
even you use RAID 3, RAID 5, RAID 6 or RAID 50, they are nothing but “RAID numbers”.
You cannot recover any data if they are all burned out.

“scratch disk” is like a working drive not for “backup”, it needs nothing but speed, reliability, and inexpensive. CalDigit’s S2VR HD is solid enough and in the right price bracket.

[Walter Biscardi]

[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.”

R&D and Support for one. CalDigit has proprietary cards, hardware and boxes that get an incredible amount of speed and stability from their products. We’re going on two months now with our CalDigit S2VR HD unit and we’ve already delivered to broadcast HD shows with it.

They’re great products and I’m already planning to bring one of the 4:4:4 models in here probably by NAB or just after NAB.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Walter Biscardi]

[msacci] “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.”

The S2VR HD runs in RAID 1 or 10. We actually run in JBOD mode to get the most speed and we also installed a LaCie 2TB Biggest Disk as a back up device. Each lunch and at the end of the day, all material is backed up to the LaCie.

Even purchasing the two units, I saved money over a RAID 3 Fibre solution that would offer the same storage on the CalDigit.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[David Smith]

Lots of great discussion about RAID on this thread, thanks everyone.

I’m using a Firmtek box and Sonnett card for my SATA II system. Been running very smoothly now for over a year with WD 500Gb Caviar SE16 drives. Very quiet and cool running. They’re 148.50 at ZipZoomFly.com with free shipping.

I also have a RAID using Hitachi 250Gb SATA II drives. They’ve been running just fine but be aware that many Hitachi drives come set to SATA I and the only way to switch them is by using a DOS utility from their website.

Regards,
David

[Gary Adcock]

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

there are a number of solutions that offer raid 3 or raid 5 less than $10K.
None that I know of are Sata but there are a number of fibre alternatives that do offer this level of protection.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Shane Ross] “how can one drive be a backup for the other 4. Sounds too sketchy to me, and I have yet to find someone explain it in a way that makes me feel comfortable with it as a solution”

Shane, I posted this in that other discussion, here’s the link, either way you are going to have to follow along. It’s basically recreating a 1s and 0s set my addition and subtraction.

https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/146/855135?univpostid=855135&pview=t

and for ease of reading, here’s a copy paste from the ciprico forum on how RAID3 works.

[Lance R. Gropper] “Hello Ya’all:

I had a couple of calls last week, where customers were asking what parity and RAID 3 was, so here’s the skinny on it: For starters, our arrays currently have 5 drives per controller (Not mentioning the 4110). At it’s most basic level, the data is simply 1’s and 0’s…In RAID 3, there is a dedicated parity drive — this drive does not store the raw data itself. Instead, it stores the complement of the data. Suppose you have the following 4 drives containing data:

D1 D2 D3 D4
0 1 0 1
0 1 1 0
1 1 0 1

If you add the 1’s across horizontally, you will get either an odd or even number. The parity drive has it’s bit set so that the number added up, including the parity drive, is always odd (D5 is the parity drive):

D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
0 1 0 1 1
0 1 1 0 1
1 1 0 1 0

Now suppose you lose a drive — i.e. drive 2:

D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
0 ? 0 1 1
0 ? 1 0 1
1 ? 0 1 0

We know that the number must always be odd, so we re-add the remaining digits. If the number is even, then drive 2 must be 1, and of the number is odd, then the drive 2 must be 0:

D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
0 1 0 1 1
0 1 1 0 1
1 1 0 1 0

One question I get is what if the parity drive goes down. The answer is simple: then all that’s left is the data…

Sometimes I get asked how is RAID 3 different from RAID 5?

The main difference is that whereas RAID 3 has a dedicated parity drive, RAID 5 has the parity distributed:

D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 <- RAID 3 RAID 5 -> D1 D2 D3 D4 D5
D D D D P D D D D P
D D D D P P D D D D
D D D D P D P D D D
D D D D P D D P D D
D D D D P D D D P D

In each “row”, which represents corresponding sectors on different drives, in RAID 3, the parity data is simply written on the fly, so there is no formatting required. However, in RAID 5, the location of Parity in each “row” must be calculated, hence requring formatting. As arrays get bigger and bigger, the format time for RAID 5 will increase (Going from hours to days to weeks). In our RAID 3, it only takes about 20 seconds to prepare the array to be initialized by the computer.
Lance GropperCiprico”

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Shane Ross] “If anyone who has that setup and actually experienced a failure could chime in, I’d appreciate it”

Sorry, I forgot to add that part. I was doing an extremely low budget, hour long doc for PBS that was shot on dvcam. Producers wanted to film look it, so I chatted with Graeme a few times and got his film effects plug in and went to work. Now along with all the other cc and such, along with Film Effects, the render was quite long, something on the verge of 8-10 hours (dual 2.0 G5). I did everything I could do during the day and then started the render at night and walked away to go get some much needed rest. I have a huge Systems 4105 in running in RAID3 (Huge is now called Ciprico). I came in the next morning and the RAID was squealing (a constant high pitched squeal means a drive is down, you can’t miss it along with the solid orange light telling you which drive failed). My heart sank, I didn’t feel good for a second, I thought about Murphy and his law and I also remember thinking that the project was due in three or so days. I had time to rebuild it if I worked around the clock (keep in mind this was an hour long doc shot over months, lots and lots of footage and interviews plus a film look, and some light AE stuff). I sat down to the machine, Final Cut was still open from the long render, the entire timeline was rendered, everything played, I was golden. I Immediately saved and quit FCP and shut everything down to stop the squealing RAID. I got on the horn and called Huge and spoke with Robert and Lance and they had me do a few things and then they decided to swap out the drive, which left me with a RAID0 array running at the same speed as before the one drive died. In the meantime, I fired up the machine, muted the alarm and continued working like nothing ever happened. Let me say that again; in the meantime, I fired up the machine, muted the alarm and continued working like nothing ever happened. An hour later the client came in, we watched the color corrected and film looked program, made some color and sound tweaks and had a very productive day. The next morning, the new drive showed up and I was getting set to master, make approval DVDs for the board and all that stuff. I swapped out the drive (a 3 minute process), set the RAID to rebuild and away I went, continuing to work, while editing, mastering, encoding whatever. Totally transparent. In an hour or two the Raid beeped a few times telling me RAID 3 had been restored and I was then back to being fully protected.

There was no way I would have been able to do this without RAID3. If I didn’t have the RAID3, client would not have come in and I would have been sweating bullets trying to get it all redone telling them “uhh, the drive died dude…so sorry”. EVen if I had two identical RAID 0 raids before the render, I would have lost a full day (or more) to rerendering the sequence.

I will admit, this case is probably extreme, and maybe it doesn’t pertain to your workflow, but since then I am so glad to know that if a drive fails I can work, get projects done and wait for a replacement drive to come overnight in the meantime. Last week, I had four projects going out the door on the same day, literally, now perhaps I am too ‘paranoid’, but if the drive failed and I was not Raid3 protected there was no way I could have kept any semblance of a relationship with any of those clients. I’d be out on my butt. Even if I had two raid0 raids backed up to one another, the cost/time of rebuilding a DVD project, or remastering a tape, or rerendering a 10 bit uncompressed color correction session could not fly. As it is I was already delivering stuff on a next flight out currier service that night trying to get it all done. Extreme? Yes. Am I paranoid? No. I sleep better knowing a drive can fail and I can work.

Jeremy