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[OT] idea for RAID
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[JeremyG] “If tight deadlines and long projects are your bag, then I would suggest as does Walter and others, pre-configured RAIDs are the way to go. Support and help is then just a phone call and an overnight package away.”
can’t put it much better than that. I’ve been in the same boat with Medea a few times where a single drive failure did not stop the job. Overnight of a new drive or even a new array in two cases from the company and the job never stopped rolling.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Hi,
I believe that many of us would buy the world, no questions asked, if we had unlimited resources. I suspect that Varangian may not have huge resources available, he/she wants to build a decent media storage system. Some of the comments made don’t seem to be as helpful as they could be. And, after an initial “warning” about potential issues with “rolling your own” solutions, subsequent comments restating that concern begin to come off as “I have a bigger RAID than you do,” without helping further.
The fact is that there are many “pros” with different budget levels. Would anyone really say that a PVM series Sony monitor is insufficient for color correction when compared with a BVM series model? I don’t think so. The latter is primarily made for 24/7 heavy-duty usage, for years on end.
Now, to actually answer the original post….
I compared prices myself and found out that I could roll my own SATA RAID with enterprise level hard drives for less than 1/2 the price of an Apple branded model (same with others).
I bought an external enclosure recommended by barefeats.com from macgurus.com, along with a Sonnet 8-port (external) PCI card, eSATA cables (2m in length), and enterprise level drives from Western Digital (RE2 models).
The case I bought has 8 bays. I opted for the LCD hot swap drive caddies. I use 6 drives RAIDed together, with the remaining two as swappable backup drives. I use SoftRAID, as Apple doesn’t support RAID use (via Disk Utility’s software RAID) under anything but Mac OS X Server. I keep full backups of my media by swapping drive caddies to a local storage space (closet 😉 ), with duplicate storage off-site.
At some point, I may RAID all 8 drives for even better performance, upgrade to a “better” hardware-based RAID PCI (or PCIe) card, and get a duplicate setup to serve as a Mirror/”safety net,” all for less than the price of a “high-end” system (not counting support contracts). In this setup, I could switch to a backup system, as needed.
With 6 drives RAIDed (striped), I get over 300 MB/sec read and write performance (read is a bit faster than write). I am pleased with the setup. Do I feel vulnerable to a disk failure? Heck no. None of this means I wouldn’t enjoy having a fully-loaded Apple X-RAID system sitting next to my G5 (especially if someone else paid for it)….
Hope this helps.
-Dave
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Didn’t Avid just buy Medea? Not a biggie, but not sure how that will affect the long term support that Medea owners have enjoyed. Avid has a way with absorbing companies…then burying them in their corporate web.
Love Medea’s products however.
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
[Rich Rubasch] “Didn’t Avid just buy Medea? Not a biggie, but not sure how that will affect the long term support that Medea owners have enjoyed. Avid has a way with absorbing companies…then burying them in their corporate web.”
This has been discussed both on this forum and in the Medea forum in the appropriate threads. You can read up on what Don McDonnell from Medea had to say about the merger.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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[davemcc] “And, after an initial “warning” about potential issues with “rolling your own” solutions, subsequent comments restating that concern begin to come off as “I have a bigger RAID than you do,” without helping further.”
Dave, I’m sorry you have taken this advice this way. I am in no way trying to say my raid is better/bigger/superior/crappier/smaller in any way. I am just trying to help out. After having personally tried the SATA solution (granted it has probably improved much since the last time I jumped in) I thought I would add to what others have been saying and also share my experience. Have you had a drive fail when you have an unprotected RAID, Dave? Have you been there when the client is looking at you while you sweat and try to figure out what to do next when the tape is due at fedex in three hours, but instead you are swapping cables, cursing, and trying to get the damn RAID to mount? To me, storage is not a place to skimp in an FCP or NLE setup. Also, it requires a tad bit more work and time to install/upkeep/upgrade/fix etc. By your analogy of the PVM and BVM, if your PVM monitor gives up the ghost in the middle of an edit, you can keep right on working. It won’t be perfect and definitely not ideal, but it’s not a show stopper. If all your media disappears, that’s pretty much all she wrote. SATA has a growing popularity and do it yourself RAIDS will probably have more of a place in the NLE market in the very near future. There are many many options out there for RAIDs, Apple’s is certainly not the only one. I don’t have an Apple RAID for a couple of reasons but one of them being price. The price to performance ratio was just not capturing my imagination. You don’t have to buy fibre which tends to be the pricier of the RAIDS today. You can buy a SCSI system that has the same great performance and protection at a cheaper price. I run my own system and freelance around and often drag my system all around the country and I needed something that was going to be reliable. I don’t have a big equipment budget, but when I threw down for my RAID I knew that i was buying into at least three years of service due to the warranty. I’m just saying it’s money well spent. I didn’t pay for an extra service contract, it “came with” the RAID. And you wonder why the drives from RAID manufacturers are more expensive than off the shelf drives? It’s because the drives are tested to be the best of the best and companies charge for that testing and reliability.
I’m sorry if you felt that some of us are ‘showing off’ or being ‘RAIDIER than thou’, but that is not my intention and I’m sure not the intention of the other posters in this thread. I can only speak from experience and I absolutely do not wish a drive failure of an unprotected RAID on anyone. It sucks.
And for Varangian, at the very least you should look into SATA raid packages from firmtek or ProMAX. ProMAX has great support and they preconfigure all of the products they send out of the door. You will pay a little more for them, but you will be buying peace of mind. Trust me.
Jeremy
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How about the Huge MediaVault Max 4105 Series as an option.
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[David Roth Weiss] “many of the companies that sell pre-configured raids use cheap consumer-level hard drives, it could be argued that home-grown raids, built with enterprise-level hard drives, may be more reliable and a better value.”
Maybe someone can tell me whether I was imagining this. Stuck overnight at JFK Airport a number of years ago, I happened to be sitting at one of those then-new-fangled AT&T telephones when (I believe) its internal memory was polled and rebooted. You could actually see on the little LCD screen what appeared to be hard drive information, and though I can’t swear to it because I was so surprised (and tired), the drive i.d. numbers looked VERY familiar to me, having sat through many a boot-up of my discreet edit* system.
More to the point…
David, how do you tell enterprise-level drives from consumer — is it just a matter of the warranty?
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Coincidentally that’s what I use. It is fast, small, portable, and quiet. I have had very good luck with it. There are also companies like Medea, terrablock, adtx, and countless others. It really depends on how much storage you need and what kind of media you plan to edit. The 4105 can handle 10 bit uncompressed, but it needs to be empty and then it can only fill up to 60% or so. I can edit uncompressed SD and compressed HD on it all day long until it is all filled up. 8 and even 10 bit uncompressed 720p24 is not a problem either. If you are going to editing 10 but uncompressed HD I’d suggest either two 4105s or one 4210. I never really work with HDCam material so 10 bit uncompressed 1080i is not a concern for me. If I do need to upgrade, I can easily add another 4105.
Jeremy
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i am still using firewire and usb2 drives, lol!
i can feel the heat in this room!
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[davemcc] “upgrade to a “better” hardware-based RAID PCI (or PCIe) card,”
what is this hardware based RAID PCI card option you speak of?
(and thanks to all for the debate, it has been infomative.)
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