*Willing to Spend!* – FCPX SAN for 3 Stations

[Bob Zelin]

I am not going to give you a complete reply.
5000 euros is not a lot to spend for this solution. You said that you already tried Synology and
you lost an inch of hair. You may have lost an inch of hair, but not an inch out of your wallet.
Synology (and everyone else that you will research, and ask “what about this company”) sells exactly
what you want. But it’s the EXPENSIVE version, with the 10gig ethernet option, and the 10 gig switch, that will allow the Synology (and everything else) to work. Yes, you buy the big Synology rack mount with 8 or 16 drives, and the 10gig option, and the 10gig switch, and then you have what you want.

So when you ask, “well, what about this one” – my generic smart ass answer is NO NOT THAT ONE, the other model, the EXPENSIVE ONE, with all the features and options, and that one will work. I can sit here and say “buy brand XYZ and that will work for you”, but I won’t because it is above your budget.
Everyone you see on these forums, and everyone that advertises, can sell you a working solution. Every brand that you mention will have “the cheap stuff” and “the expensive stuff”. And the expensive stuff is bigger, faster, more powerful, and have the features that you need to accomplish this. Unfortunately, Thunderbolt networking does not work (yet), and even when it does, it’s not going to work with 4 SATA drives. And Blackmagic does not offer a miracle solution for “$295.

When you look at all the solutions, and you say “wow, this top brand has a model that is cheap!” – it means that it has limited users, or no expansion, or can barely accomplish what you want (or simply can’t accomplish what you want). You have already found this out with synology, and let me assure you, Synology has a model that does exactly what you want – you just don’t want to pay for it.

bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Declan Casey]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your response. I do appreciate where you’re coming from ( I get it every day from clients – the best one yet was “we want our video to be like the opening title sequence of Iron Man 3..” for 2000euro).

I would happily spend the 10K or so required if we had it, but that just not the case. So I guess it comes down to what would be possible in our price bracket ( if anything at all) and what performance we could expect.

Just to clarify, we’re currently using 4×4 eSATA cases, not one, and only really need 2 “proper” seats, I only edit very rarely now.

If there’s nothing we can do in our price bracket so be it, thanks again for your help.

[David Gagne]

You didn’t mention how many iMacs you have.

For $5k I’d say just forget true shared storage. You simply can’t do it justice.

If I were in your shoes and I had $5k to spend I’d first sell that mac pro so you have $5.2k to spend 🙂

Then I’d work on properly equipping each workstation with it’s own direct attach storage (Promise, Lacie, etc, RAID5). If you need to copy files around, you can share them amongst each other, but don’t try to work off each others drives.

If you have any money left over after getting that setup, I’d save it towards your future upgrade, which in my mind should FIRST be a large backup storage (not production). After you get that in place, THEN get some shared production storage.

[Bob Zelin]

I would like to expand on David’s response. Lets just say that you “could” network with a $100
switch from the office store, and regular ethernet cable. Or lets just say that you “could” successfully
network with Thunderbolt cables (which may be the case one day soon). Even when this day comes, you are not going to have shared storage without a lot of drives and a disk drive host controller that is able to provide the speed that you will need to support multiple workstation. When you see some of the companies show systems with 3 drives or 4 drives, and say that this is a full shared storage system , well, it’s not. It will only offer you limited streams, and limited number of client connections. And for these very entry level systems, when they say “we can do 4 ethernet clients”, this usually means that they can get each of the 4 clients to do ONE stream of compressed video (like ProRes).

From my experience, without having 8 drives running in a RAID array, you will have very very limited performance, no matter whose system you purchase. Bottom line – 8 drives and a good host controller to run these drives costs a lot of money. So no matter what miracle product is coming down the line, the drive array will be your limiting factor.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com