SATA or SCSI raid drives better for FCP?

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Sean ONeil] “I was just pointing out the existence of SAS to highlight the fact that legacy SCSI is truly dead.”

In the words of Miracle Max (Princess Bride), it’s not dead, it’s just mostly dead! 😉

I think the near future is SATA to either SCSI or Fiber. When we finally get a variety of controllers that let us put a goodly number of drives together as RAID 3 or RAID 5, then I’ll shout SATA from every rooftop & steeple. I don’t see SAS in our market due to it’s high cost & lack of large drives- but if that changes I’d shout SAS from every rooftop & steeple, too!

But what do I know? I’m just an editor.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[dom111] “From what I’ve seen fibre channel drives are pretty costly.”

about the same as any high end SCSI solution and I’ll second Gary’s notion that SCSI is a dying format, especially on the Mac side. Apple does not support it anymore. I switched from SCSI to Fibre two years ago and will never look back.

We’re very satisfied with our LaCie SD2 Sata array which has been cutting 8bit uncompressed SD since January with zero hiccups. It does support 10bit SD, but we don’t have a need for that right now in that suite with the projects it is cutting.

But for me, Fibre Channel is the only way to go. We get 350MB/sec with our current Med

[Alan Okey]

I just checked out the link – looks nice. I’m pretty sure it will have OS X drivers, as Atto is usually quite good about this. It would be great to have an SAS hardware RAID controller that would give you the choice of using SAS and/or SATA drives as necessary.

[Sean Oneil]

Yes, it could be nice to see for the future. As of right now, stripping a bunch of 7200rpm drives togehter works for most people. But with 10 gigabit ethernet and PCIe, the speed of a single disk drive is increasingly becoming a problematic bottleneck. You can only stripe so many disks together.

Evenually I’d like it if our studio could allow many editors to work with multi-stream, uncompressed HD or even 2k off the same SAN without any hiccups.

Sean

[Neobe Velis]

Hi Alan,

I’ve just ordered a 2TB Lacie SATA 4 Disk Array and after reading this I’m thinking about canceling it. I don’t know anything about the SATA to Fibre option. Are there any brands/models you can point me to? I’m not sure if the seagate model you referenced is Sata to Fibre but I would like to investigate this before my drive ships.

Thanks,
Neobe

[Alan Okey]

[nvelis] “I’ve just ordered a 2TB Lacie SATA 4 Disk Array and after reading this I’m thinking about canceling it. I don’t know anything about the SATA to Fibre option. Are there any brands/models you can point me to? I’m not sure if the seagate model you referenced is Sata to Fibre but I would like to investigate this before my drive ships.”

Well, I wouldn’t cancel your order just because there are RAIDs/JBODs with Fibre Channel interfaces and SATA drives in them. Fibre is nice because you can use optical cabling and put the array in another room, but you definiterly pay a price premium for Fibre connectivity, both for the host adapter card and for the interface on the array. Basically, if you get into Fibre interfaces, you’re in a whole new price bracket.

I got pricing quotes for the Rorke Data Qubex, which is a desktop (not rack-mounted) array with 6 SATA drives, a 4Gb Fibre Channel interface and a hardware RAID controller. The pricing is:

1.5TB for $5045.00

2.4TB for $6999.00

3TB for $7699.00

I think the Huge Systems arrays are a bit better in terms of pricing if you’re interested in RAIDs with a Fibre Channel interface. Huge’s MediaVault 4105 1.25TB array has 5 ATA drives and a hardware RAID controller that can be configured as RAID 0 or RAID 3. It has a single channel 4Gb Fibre Channel interface. B&H lists it for $4183.00.

Medea sells a 1TB 5-drive RAID 3 array with a single channel 2Gb Fibre Channel interface for $3698.50 at B&H.

For the convenience of Fibre Channel, you’re probably going to pay an extra $1K to $2K over a similarly-sized array with a SATA interface.

Several manufacturers are now offering SATA JBOD arrays with Infiniband ports, which carry 4 SATA channels over a single connector. They usually bundle a SATA to Infiniband PCI card with the array. While the maximum cable length isn’t nearly as long as what you can get with fiber optic cables using Fibre Channel, the single Infiniband cable is an improvement over using multiple SATA cables.

Products/Manufacturers to check out:

https://www.proavio.com/

https://www.maxupgrades.com/

https://www.caldigit.com/

https://hugesystems.com/

https://www.rorke.com/

https://www.transintl.com/store/category.cfm?Category=2600#top

https://firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2eEN4/

Good luck!