Thunderbolt/SAS Raid for PC

[Bob Zelin]

Hi –
I really don’t like Matthews attitude. He clearly states that he is unfamiliar with this type of equipment, and is now IN CHARGE of making this happen.

Want a working system, with a RAID that you can share ?

1) Go to Newegg, and buy your multiple REFURBISHED HP Z420 computers. These are wonderful inexpensive computers. You don’t need thunderbolt for anything that you are going to do. You can get these for under $1000 each.

2) buy an 8 bay QNAP NAS – model TVS-863+. Now you will have a drive array that is fast enough to keep up with multiple systems running at normal HD rates. Buy a Netgear 10G uplink switch (under $1000) to distribute to all the network ports on your HP PC’s, and you will have enough bandwidth to do what you want.

DONE – there is your solution for under $10,000 for everything.

How someone with little or no background in charge of this project is completely beyond me. This is not your fault – this is your bosses fault because he is too cheap to hire your local professional dealer to come in and do this for your company. Instead of relying on Creative Cow, why don’t you go to the local professional reseller, and have them put a quote together for you, for multiple PC’s, and a shared RAID array. Why on earth do you want to “custom build” these PC”s when you can simply go out and BUY THEM from reputable companies, so that you are assured that you will be able to run the Adobe CC suite, Cinema 4D, and whatever other professional applications that you need ?

Am I bashing you – no, you are being ignorant (or innocent) of the simple correct procedure of doing THE RIGHT THING. If you need a car, you don’t go to the junk yard to try to put pieces together to have a car. You go to a used car lot if you don’t have money, and you find a used car, with some sort of support from the lot that you bought it from.

Anyway, not only did I provide you with detailed information previously about RAID cards for your PC that would work reliably for you, I have just given you a complete list of equipment that you can purchase, without having to build anything, and will do exactly what you want for the budget that you want.

If you are determined to put together a Win Thunderbolt based solution, I can only ask WHY ? You don’t have the budget to do this. What benefit will Thunderbolt give you at your budget ?
You can get a Promise R8, for example, that requires Windows 10 drivers, but how are you going to share this ?

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I came across this storage box from QNAP at a show a couple of weeks ago
“The QNAP TVS-871T is the world’s first Thunderbolt DAS/NAS/iSCSI SAN triple solution. “

Its an 8-bay box with Thunderbolt 2 and USB3 for DAS functionality, as well as 2x 10 GigE, and 4x GigE ports for simultaneous NAS functionality. The specs on the site says two machines can connect to this simultaneously over Thunderbolt too.

There’s also a HDMI port to playback up to 4k video, and a built in app to transcode video, though I could not see this feature in action in the demo I saw.

The box is available without drives too.

I have no experience with QNAP products so I’m not sure this will work in all situations. But it looks like an interesting feature set.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Greg Janza]

matthew, the folks here are quite knowledgeable and we’re all better off for having them as regular contributors on this forum.

But at the same time, there are inexpensive options for a single system.

I’ve upgraded to TB3 on my pc by purchasing a gigabyte x99p-sli mobo and I’m using an OWC Thunderbay 4 with it for editing with an Akitio T3T Adapter.

I did all of this for less than $1300.

[Matthew Bowden]

Greg, thanks for the reply. This thread is almost two years old. I ended up purchasing a matching thunderbolt card for my computer and also purchased a Pegasus 2 R6 Thunderbolt raid.