RAID set up advise please

[John Davidson]

I just can’t see where $6900 for an 8Tb HDPro that you can’t upgrade yourself justifies the additional $4,700 over a fully upgradable solution. In my opinion, having done it and seeing how easy it was, the price-per gigabyte RAID model is outmoded, especially considering that Caldigit isn’t actually manufacturing super special drives that you can’t get anywhere else. Hitachi is Hitachi.

Further, in a few months (once the 2Tb drives are proven in the market), I’ll be upgrading my system to a 13Tb array – something I can’t do with Caldigit. Replacing the ram and hard drive in my old model macbook pro was harder than building this raid. Maybe buying Caldigit helps people sleep at night, but I could hire an engineer for two solid weeks for that markup. Sure, they test it. Sure, they have good support. It’s not like they’re going to come to my house and help me if I got screwed by a bad card or something. I’m not trying to insult Caldigit – but surely they realize that, unless they come out with some sort of super-unique solution like Holographic RAID storage or something unfailable and awesome, they’ll always going to have guys pop into their forum saying ‘can i use my own drives’ – and the answer is yes, but the official answer is no, and that’s why I didn’t buy it.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I completely agree with you John. And I’m coming from a background where we have Bright, SGI, and Discreet storage, so we know a thing or two about paying premiums for storage.

The thing about paying a ‘bit more’ to sleep well at night depends on where you are located. Caldigit, or AJA, or Atto, or whoever may have good service but that’s just where you are. What if you are in Cape Town, or 40 miles outside Amsterdam, or in Mumbai? How soon will anyone with ‘terrific service’ in L.A. service your RAID?

The best RAID, like the best anything, is something that does not need service. That just works. And to build that kind of a RAID, some amount of study, of hard work, is essential. If you do it, and it works, so be it.

If it doesn’t, then with effort, your second RAID will work for sure. And the bulk of the cost of parts you ‘wasted’, is drives. These can be used anywhere. Just get a SATA dock, and your drives become ‘tera-floppies’ or ‘tera-cartridges’.

So with RAID, please experiment. And keep reporting… here, or over at the SAN forum at the Cow. Yes, there’s a SAN forum with some great insights on large storage systems.

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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[John Davidson]

It’s fun to learn to do things for yourself. Maybe someone will make a “How to build a 7Tb RAID-5 for under $2k” tutorial on the Cow. I bet lots of readers would be very interested.

[Kaito Tanno]

All I can say is WOW! … Thanks guys.

Knowledge and feedback money can’t buy, and if you could, I wouldn’t be able to afford it.

I think I will go for the ATTO.

Thanks again.