SAS raid reccomendations

[Walter Biscardi]

WeibeTech RTX series (though not sure if they have an SAS version, you can check on the website.

Maxx Digital

Small Tree Electronics

Sonnet

Dulce

All of those manufacturers make excellent SAS / SATA arrays. We run 48TB of Maxx Digital Storage. 32TB of it runs off an Ethernet SAN with Small Tree electronics magic. We also have two of the WiebeTech RTX units that we use for archiving, though they can also be set up in RAIDs.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
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Biscardi Creative Media

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[Jason Levy]

Thanks Walter. That is appreciated.

jason

[John Fishback]

We use a PDE enclosure with 8-drives running off a R380. It works great.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.2, Motion 4.0.2, Comp 3.5.2, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.2)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[Jason Levy]

Thanks John.

[Peter Mcauley]

I’ve been looking at the Proavio raids along with the R380 as well. What happened to yours that you don’t like.

Peter McAuley
AXYZ
Toronto

[Jason Levy]

I feel bad for not updating this post..

It’s a long saga, but in the end the Proavio box is fine.

What happened in brief was that the setup never quite functioned right initially and we could not do much because it was in service and there was a huge amount of media on it. The atto utility kept reporting that the drives were “degraded”, and could not be rebuilt, though it still worked. When the project was done I tried to re-stripe it and it failed every time.

I asked the dealer I bought the unit and the atto from for support.. and he told me that he was very sorry but they had been having complaints about the Proavio box and he no longer carried it and would not support it. He of course offered to sell me something else. He said that there was an incompatibility with the chip in the Proavio that caused problems and there was no way to fix my problem.

Finally (not sure why I waited) I called Proavio tech support and the guy was great and solved the problem. It was simply that the ATTO card was in too slow a slot. It’s running in one of the Mac Pro’s that use a utility to to set the speed of the various slots. I am running a configuration that is approved by Kona and it all works but we cannot format the raid 5 in that configuration. Finally with the help of the guy from Proavio I sped up the slot and was able to format the raid 5 and then put it back the way it was so the Kona would work properly and now everyting is working perfectly.

Regarding the supposed “incompatibility” the guy from Proavio knew what that was about. Aparently some model of Seagate drive (you can call proavio tech support and ask which) do not work with the chip set of certain of their boxes..

All’s well that ends well. Proavio has great tech support. The guy was good.

Jason

[John Fishback]

Tech support is so critical. When we put together our system, ATTO and our integrator were amazingly helpful. We faced the firmware issue that affected some Seagate drives. We couldn’t do the firmware fix ourselves since we’re a Mac shop with only a couple of PCs and none with the specs needed. So our integrator took back the drives, updated the firmware and had them back to us a day later.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.8 QT7.6.4 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870, 24″ TV-Logic Monitor, ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
FCS 3 (FCP 7.0.2, Motion 4.0.2, Comp 3.5.2, DVDSP 4.2.2, Color 1.5.2)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO & 192 Digital I/O, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN