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Storage solution for FCP
Hi all.
This is my first post and I wanted to get some opinions on the storage solution I have worked up for our video Dept. I will give a brief summery of our situation and needs and then offer the low cost solution I want my company to purchase. All opinions welcome.
We have 3 main editing stations, 1 dual G5, 1 single G5, and 1 I-Mac G5. Over the last 2 years we have purchased 45 IDE drives and have been using cheap slide drives with a firewire connection. Yes thats a lot of drives. and no we dont erase old projects.lol. My goal is to use the current drives and purchase large cases that can RAID IDE drives.
There are only a few products on the market. The Fire-Vue cases are the least expensive and seem the way to go considering our budget. https://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg17_firewirehubs.htm
Has anyone had experience with them? good? bad?I want to purchase 3 cases (one for each editing station)each would hold 8 drives in either a JBOD or RAID. This would greatly increase our ability to organize these drives. and organize our workflow.
The other part of the solution would involve pruchasing 1 or more 750GB drive from Apple. That way we can media manage our projects onto the G5’s internal drive in case we need some extra speed.
I want to stick with IDE drives and Firewire because its easy and cheap. But there are tons of other options out there for SATA or x-raid, and we are not ruling that out yet.
Thanks,
JaYce -
4 Replies
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Well for starters you need to stripe identcal drives at least in capacity… I’d actually want them to be the same model too. At least the same spec… 7200 RPM and 8mb of disk cache and the same capacity. The smallest capacity drive will ‘force’ the other drives to be that size too in a raid as I recall.
Jerry
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Jay,
Your solution is not great by any stretch. Today’s SATA solutions are so cheap, so reliable and offer so much flexibility that it pains me to see you investing the time and money to dink around with makeshift solutions using old drives just because they were once expensive.
Brand new 300gb enterprise level SATA drives are $118 at https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144032. With an inexpenive SATA raid enclosure (see Firmtek.com) you could be running drives that are like 4x faster than your previous drives and swapping the drives out between jobs and bewteen rooms at will, and all for very little dough.
DRW
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SATA all the way. Nothing else even comes close to making as much sense at this point in time.
Sean
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Thanks for the input guys. Although we have enough storage… its just not accessable and organized. hence Im looking for a way to improve our workflow. I will do some more research on SATA and a cost analysis though.
one question: WIll SATA work with an I-Mac G5? my understanding is that you need a SATA card.
jason
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