Large Storage solution needed

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Paul –
yes, I understand that you do not want to be “railroaded” by a salesperson, whose only concern is to get the highest commission on what they sell you. But the good news is that ALL the brands you see here on Creative Cow are all excellent professional products.
So if you chose a storage solution from JMR, Cal Digit, Maxx Digital, Sonnet Technology, ProAvio, Small Tree, or countless others that you see advertise on Creative Cow, you will be getting an excellent product. Every one of these companies offers a nice RAID controller card that works with the Mac computers, and all of them are reliable. The only way to get screwed is to go online, and find the cheapest no name drive you can find, with no name parts, and purchase that (as so many people do). Creative Cow has professional advertisers on their forums, and you will not go wrong with anything that you choose – they all work, they all do the job, they all have good support.

The way you will get screwed is if you wind up with some ultra cheapo drive array from Lacie or the LOWER END products from Other World Computing, etc. Let me be perfectly clear that both Lacie and Other World Computing make PROFESSIONAL drive arrays (OWC makes the Jupiter series for example) that are excellent, and every bit as good as what you see here on these forums, and banner ads. But these products from OWC and Lacie are just as expensive as their competitiors that are on the Cow forums. The cheap tin cans that cost $599 for an 8TB RAID array are completely useless, and you will have nothing but grief from products like these.

I know that you are looking for someone to say “buy this – it’s great” – but I can assure you that all of the “good brands” which is pretty much all of them on Creative Cow will work perfectly for you.
If you are looking for specific features of a disk drive array, please state what they are, and I will try to respond to this.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Paul Escamilla]

Got it. I’m just a little leery of going to sales-people first due to a bad experience in the past.

It’s reassuring to know I can rely on any of the vendors who advertise on the Cow.

[Andrew Johnstone]

I am in similar solution and I have just bumped my head on my data storage ceiling!

I run a small film company and of course we shoot digital. I have a single drive that I use to store rushes and then a scratch disc for FCP where all the files are ‘logged and transferred” to.

Neither is a raid drive which is not very secure, but at least I do have two copies of the original content just to be sure, but I’d still like a better solution.

I have a couple of small raids, to which, from time to time I archive older projects, but I am right out of space and need to find a really good solution.

I can see 4/6TB G-TEch raids and LAcies raids for sale for around £450 ($600) here in UK, but I am pretty sure that I will fill a 6TB raid in a few short months, so what to do? The cloud is not really a solution for this much data – too slow.

IS the best solution to walk the drives round to an offsite data centre and dump the material off an pay for data storage?

I’d really like to hera about an affordale solution for all this data…

Andy Johnstone
Wild Dog Limited
film & multimedia production
http://www.wilddogworld.com