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RAID enclosure recommendation
My usual preface: thanks in advance for the help and apologies for any ignorance on my part. I’m looking for an 8 bay hot-swappable hard drive enclosure plus a controller card that will serve two purposes:
-accommodate one set of individual JBOD drives for project archiving (i.e., each client has their own drive that we can swap in and out as needed)
-when needed, swap in a set of drives in a RAID configuration for storage and playback of 1 stream of uncompressed 10 bit HD video (probably 1080i60).Is this possible? Basically a setup that can switch back and forth between JBOD and RAID, then has the transfer speed for HD playback?
Again, thanks for the input!
John -
2 Replies
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you don’t want to do this. When you pull out (or hot swap) a drive from an 8 bay RAID 5 group, you will “degrade” the RAID array, and you will have to rebuild the group. Yes, you can shut down, and pull out all the drives, and then just put in one single drive, and configure that one drive as a JBOD, but it will be MUCH easier to simply have a second enclosure that you can use as removable storage for clients. There are many wonderful RAID 5 arrays from the advertisers you see here advertising on Creative Cow (Dulce, Maxx Digital, Cal Digit, G-Tech, etc.) but for a single drive enclosure, the Wiebetech RTX100 series is wonderful, cheap, and lets you hand a single drive to the customer. This way, you never “lose” your RAID 5 array, which can do uncompressed HD. All the RAID 5 arrays you see advertised on Creative Cow are very good.
So, can you pull out all 8 drives from a Cal Digit, Dulce, Maxx Digital, G-Tech, etc, and pop in a single drive, and just use it as a single drive array – YES. Would I do this – absolutely not. Get a second enclosure.
Bob Zelin
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I use one of these for my client backups: https://www.vantecusa.com/front/product/view_detail/372
I buy bare drives and then bill the client to archive their project.
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