Kona & SATA II Raids

[Walter Biscardi]

Maybe, but are you cutting “mission critical” material such as broadcast or projects with hard deadlines? If that’s the case I would never ever build my own unit, nor have I.

I go with a proven company like Medea (I run their FCR2X Fibre Channel array) because I know it’s configured for optimal audio / video work and if there’s a problem, I can call tech support to figure it out. In over 8 years of running Medea products I have never missed a deadline due to a harddrive failure on their arrays. Does it cost more? Yes. Does it give me better piece of mind? Absolutely.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

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[Tony]

I have used an internal SATA I array in a G5 with dvcproHD and it worked fine.
The major issue I have with the SATA I drives is the cheap non locking connector.

The drawback is you must constantly back up the media to external drives since the raid I build did not mirror.

I have a similar setup on my G4 running internal drives also.

Tony Salgado

[Ramona Howard]

Richard,

Walter has a very good point. Building a system is possible but is not for everyone. SATA can be a excellent option if you know what your doing, otherwise turn to the experts if you don’t want the headaches.

Our systems are good and do everything we need them to, but only after about 6 months of development and working closley with all of the component manufactures. Do you have the time to spare is what you should be asking yourself.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Joe Murray]

I built my last set of drives using a rackmount enclosure and drive sleds from Granite Digital. It was a SCSI setup with 8 drives, and I saved a good bit of money doing it. However, I just bought a 2 Terabyte SATA RAID from Promax for less than $3000. It’s working great, and I wouldn’t have saved that much (considering that my time researching and building it is worth something) had I built one on my own. A good 1-800# for support is also a wonderful thing.

Joe Murray

[Bob Zelin]

Richard –
I am almost 100% of the time using SATA arrays for all my FCP systems now (except for uncompressed HD), without issue. Companies like ProMax and Granite Digital are excellent. I have been buying from Maxx Digital in California to get the Firmtek cases. This does not mean that the HUGE and Medea products are not excellent – but SATA is cheaper, and SO FAR has shown to be reliable. But for “home made” – where you buy the bare case, put all the wiring together – just so you can save a few hundred bucks – if you are a student, then go for it. IF you make your living doing this, and people rely on you, dont be foolish – buy a solution with support.
The main reason most users are on this particular AJA forum is because of
AJA’s support (aside from the fact that they make a great product). When you are in trouble, support becomes everything. With all of this said, SATA II drives are not available to you, yet – just the host cards.

Bob Zelin

[T. J. shank]

Actually, LaCie is offering the “Biggest S2S” array in 1.25 Tb and 2.5 Tb sizes with a SATA II card. So far, I have had only good experiences with the smaller one and FCP, and the price is very reasonable. Read times are in the 180 – 200 Mb/sec. range.

tjs

[Richard Chin]

Thanks for the advice everyone. I built a SATA raid for a friend on a PC and I figured hey!… if I could get a temperamental Windows machine to use and accept it then building one for a Mac should be even easier. However I think everyone is right; it is an expensive gamble to take. I will look at one of the known brand names instead.

[Andy Edwards]

One last comment on building your own:

Check out http://www.macgurus.com

They have all the SATA cases and cards you might want to use. Built my own 1.2TB SATA box and works like a champ. It might not be fast enough for full blown HD, but it works fine with DVCPRO HD. Plus it is more reliable then the 3 failing Lacie Firewire 800 drives I bought over a year ago.

Andy

[Russell]

I built a 4 Terabyte Raid (technically a striped array) with 8 of the new Hitachi 500GB Sata II drives and the Sonnet Tempo X Card.

It’s very quite and the Kona drive test shows I’m getting read / write speeds of around 475MB / sec. The Hitachi drives ship with a default of 1.5Gb/s per second which I left alone since the Sonnet card can’t handle any more. Once Sonnet comes out with their next generation card I’ll be able to turn the drives up to 3Gb/s per second and probably break the 500MB per second barrier.

I’m very pleased with the setup… but as everyone’s stated, building it your self isn’t for everyone. I backup every night on 3 Lacie 1.6TB drives to be safe.