SATA RAID ARRAY Need HELP

[Chris Tompkins]

For drive speeds and configs this is a wondeful resource here:

https://www.barefeats.com/

Places of interest:

https://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/satakits.php

https://www.kanotechnologies.com/products/hard_drives.cfm

any SATA Raid will support HDV through-put
Lacie is big w/ external firewire drives

[Mat @ lacie]

Hello Richard,
Hope you are doing well. I am with LaCie.
You can find more information about LaCie SATA solutions on our site:

LaCie d2 SATA single drive:
https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10571

LaCie S2S SATA II RAID Array (for HD):
https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10458

Let me know if you have any question.
Mat

[Jim Martin]

Promax makes quality SATA arrays as well

http://www.promax.com

Jim

[Richard Martz]

Thanks Mat. This is exactly what I’m looking for. I thought the 1.25 terabyte capacity was ideal for what I’m doing. I noticed that when you stripe for RAID 0 only 4 drives can be used. I assume that the effect of that is a 20% reduction in storage capacity. Can the remaining drive be striped and used for something else? What happens if I format for RAID 5? That should give me the benefits of RAID 0 with the Redundancy of RAID 0. Is my thinking skewed?

ANd the most important question of all…when will these drives become available?

[Mat @ lacie]

Hello Richard,
Yes you are correct, in this current version, the “FAST mode” (RAID 0) of the S2S is across 4 drives.
If you want to stripe all the drives (1.25TB or 2.5TB) you can use the “JBOD” mode of the S2S. In this mode, all 5 drives will mount on your desktop. You can then stripe then using Mac OS X Disk Utility.

RAID 5 is not supported by S2S yet. Maybe in a future version. You are right, RAID 5 offers some redundancy.
For redundancy, you could use RAID 0+1 in S2S.

If you work in HDV, you could use a different product, F800 (https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10599). It supports RAID 5.

S2S, d2 SATA and F800 are all currently available.

Mat

[Richard Martz]

I meant to say “the benefits of RAID 0 with the redundancy of a RAID 5”.

[Tristan Summers]

Trouble with Lacie is only a 2 port card…
Firmtek do an excellent 2 drive enclosure box. they do a bundle with a 4 port card. That gets you about 230MB/s just enough for HDTV

For external, I’d get 4 dual boxes from them , and an 8 port card from Sonnet. Make sure you get good cables from them as well.

For internal, I’d look at Max Connect (https://www.maxupgrades.com/istore/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.display&category_id=306)
which helps fit 7 drives in a G5 and offers a cheaper plastic version, cheapest SATA expansion I have found.

, and then if you don’t have the Nvidia monster card, the G5Jam cn fit another two behind PCI cards so mac of SATA boxerama and then what the heck get an external card as well and stick another 8 on and get over 500 MBs!!
(Mind you, am having troubles with bus speeds to my PCI-X card…)

[Tristan Summers]

I have questions about the LACIE HD box. If it is SATA2, why is it so slow? 187 is gonna be a pig doing HD. Does it have a hardware RAID? If so can you not use 2 of them in more complicated parity based RAIDS?

For much less money you can build your own 8 drive SATA RAID. I am interested in peoples experiences of doing this. I have been advised to get as fast and cheap a drive as possible and always back up often no matter what drive set up you have.

[Mat @ lacie]

Hi,
About your question about S2S.
– Speed is less than a configuration where you able 8 drives connected with 8 cables to an 8 port card. S2S is using a port multiplier technology. That allows you to control the 5 drives through 1 port/1 cable. It also features an hardware raid controller. Through the GUI you can control the unit and change RAID level on the fly.
– S2S, through its controller, supports NCQ (native command queuing)
– You can definitely use multiple S2S combined together. You use 2 or 4 S2S and stripe them across 2 SATA II channels.
– Thanks to the port multiplier technology of the S2S, you could have 4x 2.5TB conntected through only 1x 4 ports PCI-X card. To do the same with point-to-point configuration, you would need 20 ports.

For more info about port multiplier: https://www.sata-io.org/portmultiplier.asp

About SATA cards:
– S2S ships with a 4 port SATA II PCI-X card
– d2 single SATA drives ship with a free 2 port SATA card. You can use a Sonnet card with them if you want.

Speed of d2 SATA in RAID O configs (xBench):
– 4 d2 drives on 2 LaCie SATA cards: sequential write speed of 299.46MB/sec. – read speed of 215.67MB/second.
– 2 d2 drives on 1 LaCie SATA cards: 144 MB/sec. write and 110MB/sec. read

Hope this helps.
Mat