SATA Raid and Drives for New G5

[Scott Davis]

Art, I’m looking at the Burly external SATA kit from MacGurus. Not the most attractive but well made and dependable. I’m going to put 4 Seagate 7200.8 400G drives in them (zipzoomfly.com has good prices) and use a Sonnet SATA card. Altogether I should have at least 1.4 G of formated, very fast drive space for around $1500. The only draw back that I see is there is no reduncy in this setup; but hey, for the price I’ll accept the risk as none of my projects are deadline intensive. Building the RAID should be fairly simple. A matter of screwing in the drive connecting the cables, etc. Other option are offered from Firmtek, Highpoint, and many other companys. Google “external SATA”.

Scott Davis

Scott Davis

[Gunleik Groven]

I built a fairly costeffective 8 disk RAID based on the HighPoint Rocket Raid 1820A card.

Has been up for 3 months without a glitch (disregarding the sweaty minutes after upgrading to Tiger)

Upside:
Fast, Cheap and (so far) very trustworthy.
Downside: Noisy box that needs a room of its own, but SATA cables are short…

I built it from:
8 WD 400Gb 7,2k disks with 16mb cache
Standard PC cabinet with power (had to short circuit the on/off circuit to make this work, as the power “expected” a mainboard.
2 extra fans for the box
HighPoint 1820A

Cost?
Around 2000 – 2500 US $ in Norway
for a 3,2 TB RAID with pretty high throughput.

Me happy.

Gunleik

[David Smith]

I just built an internal raid using the Swift Data 200 drive bracket kit and four Hitachi 250gig eSATA drives. The bracket kit went in easily and is nicely designed. The Hitachi drives are very quiet and I haven’t noticed the G5 fans operating any faster or more frequently than before. I’m using Hardware Monitor to watch temperatures, load and fan rpm and so far I haven’t noticed any stress on the G5 at all. BareFeats has a review here:
https://www.barefeats.com/swift.html

I went with Sonnet’s new Tempo-X eSATA 4+4 controller, and eventually plan on a four bay removable drive box so I’ll then have four internal and four external drives available. The Firmtek box looks better to me than others I’ve studied and it’s smaller too. There’s a BareFeats review of it here:
https://www.barefeats.com/hard58.html

Regards,
David

[Jerry Alto]

Art- I’ve been running an external Sata RAID for two years with very few glitches. My newest RAID has been running
for 9 months without a hitch. My first PCI raid card was a Sonnet. My latest is the SeriTek 1VE4 with a 1EN2 external enclosure. They are easily installed and straightforward to format. Drives are cheap (we shoot for $.50 a gig or less). I’ve been running Western Digital with few problems but I’ve heard good things about Seagate and Maxtor also. Use the Mac Disk utility to stripe your drives as RAID 0. About 90% of our work is 8-bit uncompressed so we put a load on the system but it doesn’t seem to even break a sweat (no dropped frames).

Now the only hitch is that we are on the cusp of Sata2 with 3.0 GB per sec (rather than 1.5), I see where Sonnet is already delivering the Sata2 PCI card. Most drives I believe are already Sata2. Also be aware that the latest connector is eSata (which is more robust than the original Sata connector) so just be sure you have a match between your card and external drives. But unless you are doing uncompressed HD I feel the 1.5 GB is more than enough but check with Barefeats as suggested above to get a feeling on just what you need.

A couple of things I’ve learned along the way;
1. The Sata protocol says ‘hot-swappable’ but be very careful. We always fire off the drives first then boot the G-5.
We shut down the computer first then turn off the drives.
2. If you swap out Sata drives then boot up and launch FCP it’ll see that the drives have changed and send you to FCP system settings where you select your drives. We always just select the drives we want and move on and let FCP create the folders it needs.
Hope this helps.
Jerry