Raid 5 Setup

[Brendan Coots]

On the left-hand side of this forum, an ad for the Norco DS-1220 is running. You may want to click that ad and check the unit out. It is VERY cost effective, supports RAID 5, hosts 12 SATA II drives and connects to your RAID card/s via 4 e-SATA connectors. I like this unit because you add your own drives, which is where most RAID boxes charge their markup. If you check out Newegg, there are some really nice Enterprise-class SATA II drives that are designed specifically for RAID use and are reasonably cheap. Using the Norco box and these drives, you could have a 4TB array for under $2,500.

The nice thing about this setup is that you can split the unit in half (six drives to one machine, six to the other) by running 2 e-SATA connectors to each machine’s RAID card. You could also run all 4 e-SATA cables to 2 cards in the same machine, which would act as a file server to your two machines. Either way, you should consider the HighPoint RocketRAID 2322 RAID controller card, most reviews of the Norco unit use this card and quite successfully.

As for how to actually set everything up, it totally depends on your needs, such as the types of files you use regularly. If you need to do full 1080i 4:4:4 HD, this setup may not work for two workstations. If, however, most of your work is DVCPRO HD or lower, you have a lot of options in how to set up your system.

For example, you could get a third machine, run all 4 ports of the RAID box to it and use this machine as a central file server. For connecting your workstations, you could either buy a fibre channel switch/host cards (would cost around $5,000) which would give you 4Gbps (around 4GB a second throughput) OR get a good gigabit switch that supports port trunking, make sure your workstations and file server have dual-gigabit cards (Mac Pros do by default), trunk the ports on each card and you have a 2Gbps connection for about 1/10th the cost of fibre. If your file server has two dual-gigabit cards, and both are trunked, each workstation would theoretically have a 2Gbps connection to the server which equals about 160MB per second. This is more than enough for DVCPRO HD or below, which has a datarate of around 17MB or less.

[Tylor Larson]

Thank you so much for that response. Basically after talking with our IT guy for a while and explaining what we needed we kind of ended up at the same place. Our New Boxx systems have trucked Networks and so does our Render farm. The graphics department here will be on it own switch. So we would getting 1 gb throughput. I