Storage with Kona 2

[Ramona Howard]

Bob,

You and I seem to always be in trouble.

Without comparing to the Mac, because I can’t, let’s start.

I think we both agree, this is not for the meek.

The connectors are an issue, MLI is better than the standard connector and I can’t go into details (under NDA) but there are some changes coming out with at least one particular manufacture, I’m sure the others will follow.

We have tested a slew of manufactures and have gone with well, you will figure it out(the NDA thing) because of the changes we knew about many months ago.

It is stable if it’s done right. We suggest anytime a box is moved several items are checked that include cables, CPU’s, boards, etc. This is a given.

Our systems have NO cables exposed so once they are in, they are in. Not sure how the Mac set-up is.

Actually the only issue we have had with drives not mounting has been spinning up all the drives at once, and that we solved with staggering them. Also with drives unmounting for no reason, turned out to be a bad backplane(go figure).

Now one thing to remember is we are not doing an external array, it’s an all in one system so this may make a difference BUT again I can’t compare because we are not doing this on the Mac.

We have these systems running at several large studios, in addition to ours in-house and they are getting pounded hard. One by a 22 node render farm and it’s still able to play out (that is the render farm is hitting it without cache over bonded gigabit, all 22 nodes at once.

So yes SATA works, yes it was a pain to get it right, but it works great.

Love stirring it up with you,
Ramona