Storage advice from M100 users

[Robert Leong]

Hi tankboy, thank you for considering Dulce’s storage.

We might be able to locate a local supplier for you, please email to robert@dulcesystems.com and give us your location.

We believe our tech support is really good too, we respond quickly and understand you got to keep working on your projects and don’t have the time or the expertise to deal with storage issues. So we are here is you need any help.

The PCI-X support for Power Mac G5 is now available too and ready to ship.

Robert Leong / Dulce Tech Support

[Scott_f Media 100]

I suggest you take a look at the G-Tech drives.
https://www.g-technology.com/
We’ve looked at their G-Raid2, G-Raid mini, and their FC G-Speed. All passed our tests for performance. The G-Raid2 and Mini are both Firewire 800 and are good for Uncompressed Sd as well as compressed HD. The Fibre Channel G-Speed we passed during 11.6 testing for everything through uncompressed HD 1080i. We also try to keep our recommendation list up to date.

https://www.media100.com/peripherals.asp

Scott
Media 100/Boris Fx

[Bruce Mcpherson]

Hi Tankboy
My reccomendation is to go for the new type Seagate 11 series esata drives, they are very big (up to 1Tb, and quick and have a very large cache – all of which is what we want for video.

Ive put my drives in individual cases outside my G4 Mdd Fw800 to cut down heat buildup that was a problem in this model – I installed a sonnett 1.4 esata pci card and setup as a jbod array and have not had any problems in two years of intensive use.

I like to have the drives outside the box so I can keep an eye on the little blue light showing me the data rate thats happening on each drive. The drive cases are ICE “Sun Bright” (!)that hold one drive each, and its nice to see them twinkling away as a big render goes down 🙂 also, the clients are impressed…

I also run an external FW800 dual HDD array for the”system drive” in mirrored mode, with a spare secondary drive, that is, one primary drive that gets all the s/w loaded on it which it backs up to the secondary drive and every month or so I change to the spare secondary drive which then rewrites it to mirror the primary, so I always have a complete backup of all my documents and apps.

I was forced to these somewhat extreme measures after loosing my total system including UPS’s on two occasions, due to faulty power connections, caused by salt building up and arcing on the insultors on the transformers out in the roadway ( the Pacific Ocean is my neighbour over the road)
The spare secondary drive sits in an older G4 that I use for a print server and its damn handy to have.

I feel that the eSata system is more robust than Fw800.
I also reccomend turning off any firewire device before plugging it in. (Yes I’m Paranoid 🙂 and the owner of several Firewire Oxford Bridges that turned into Dogs when hotwired (i.e. went Woof)
HTH
Bruce

[Clare Neff]

We bought the G-Raid 1Tb, and we like it very much. I have 3 Media100 rooms – an HDE, HDX & Producer, the drive moves from one room to the other without any problems.

[Paul Crowe]

Hi Scott

thanks for your input.

Call me a pedant, but I don’t trust the flimsy connections with firewire and generally speaking I’ve found it pretty unreliable. So I’ll check out the Fibre Channel and ULTRA SCSI G-tech products you suggested.

My other irk with FW…is it just me or is threre a lag time that is specific to FW(800) in terms of things like tabbing through frames on the time line etc. In the old days when I had the Medea SCSI when I tabbed the arrow key through the timeline the response was instant and I mean instant 0 lag time – I hit the button and the frame updated. Great for when your tightening up those fine cuts – pinching frames here and there.

But now with the firewire drives theres’s a mini delay. I’ve almost got used to it – but when I think about how reponsive the old drive was it annoys the hell out of me. However I’m not absolutely sure this is purely a FW thing,

Do anyone know this evil of which I speak? Is this a firewire thing?

Cheers
Tankboy