Need a storage/possible RAID solution

[Stephen Mann]

You can’t easily “swap out” hard drives in a RAID system. Well, you can, but the RAID controller assumes the new drive replaces a bad one and it rebuilds the volume from the data contained in all the other drives. And it can take several hours.

Software-based RAID sucks.

Look at the Sans Digital 5-Bay eSATA RAID units.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Angelo Mike]

Well, I better get a RAID set up with space for a lot of hard drives. My client has footage shot over the course of 20 years.

[John Rofrano]

I have a 9TB CineRAID CR-H458 RAID 5 (4 x Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3TB IntelliPower SATA 6.0Gb/s ) that I’m very happy with. Total disk capacity is 12GB but the RAID 5 uses one disk for parity so usable space is 9TB. It attaches to my PC via eSATA or USB 3.0 and the RAID is implemented in hardware (which is what you want).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Dave Osbun]

What John said is key: a HARDWARE RAID
You’ll want whatever box that you go forward with to have an integrated RAID controller. Never use software-based RAID, as it’ll never perform as expected (even with today’s incredible SSD drives).

B&H should have a decent selection to choose from, with competitive pricing.

Dave

[Angelo Mike]

I see.

Thanks for the recommendations.

[John Rofrano]

Yea, I had a previous enclosure that used Software RAID and it had horrible performance. I learned my lesson. 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Nigel O’neill]

I use an eSATA port and add drives as needed. There is no redundancy, but I simply pull out the drive and use another when needed.

My system specs: Intel i7 970, 12GB RAM, ASUS P6T, Vegas Pro 12 (x64), Windows 7 x64 Ultimate, Vegas Production Assistant 1.0, VASST Ultimate S Pro 4.1, Neat Video Pro 2.6

[Angelo Mike]

[Nigel O'Neill] “I use an eSATA port and add drives as needed. There is no redundancy, but I simply pull out the drive and use another when needed.”

What do you mean you add drives as needed? Into an array setup?

[Angelo Mike]

This is already getting kind of crazy, having to consolidate footage between four hard drives and keep swapping out different ones to get all the footage I have onto one.

I looked up a few RAID systems, and this one looks appealing.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111181

It looks like I can pull hard drives in and out and is hard drive based. I’m not looking for hot swappable necessarily, but I do want to be able to pull out different hard drives.

And is there any drawback to using 2+ TB hard drives? Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I’ve read that you don’t necessarily want hard drives this big for video editing since they can run a little slower with all that data. Not necessarily slower, but take longer since they have more data.

[Dave Haynie]

A couple of things.

One observation: all RAIDs are software RAIDs. When you say “hardware RAID”, that can mean a few things. At the least, it means SATA hardware with some extra RAID a support. Some folks think that mandates an external box, but some external boxes are still “software” RAID. What they really mean is that the RAID chip, card, or box with its own processor to run the RAID software. Otherwise, that software runs on you PC’s processor.

My main RAID is an external Drobo box.. They have a proprietary tech, but it can run things similar to RAID 1, 5, or 6 on some models had some performance issues on older models looks mine, but it did let me add drives gradually. Many motherboards offer RAID support, as does Windows itself under NTFS. Filesystem RAID is alwaysv software only. BIOS RAID is either software only or software with some kind of acceleration in the SATA hardware. Either can give you a decent RAID 0 or 1, but usually nothing better without a huge slowdown.

To define these, for those who don’t know… RAID is a “stripe set”… You add together the storage of multiple drives into one volume. This adds speed, too, but there’s no redundancy. The life of this is the lesser of all drives: one fails, all data is lost. RAID 1 sets up two or more identical drives in a mirror config, writes go to two drives, reads come from either until an error is detected, then the other drive can supply the data. RAID 5 stores error check and correct data for fragments of data written, and allows one drive to fail completely and be replaced

No RAID let’s you add and subtract storage — use individual drives. I use separate SATA for projects, with a cheap enough drive bay that fits in a 5.25” bay.

-Dave