Alex Gardiner
Forum Replies Created
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In my view there is nothing fundamentally “wrong” with iSCSI, but it may limit what you can do with that particular storage product.
…I mean it’s not like macOS is a perfect customer with SMB. lol
Another thing you could try is setting Jumbo frames on server/client and any switches.
Finally, take the AJA and Blackmagic Disk Speed Test results with a pinch of salt. These are a guide and far from an accurate way to evaluate what your storage can do. They do not account for the minutiae of agonisingly stupid issues Mac’s encounter working over a network, regardless of who’s product you use!!
Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com -
Did you disable SMB signing on your Mac?
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205926
Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com -
haha nice!
So you’re really spoilt for choice when it comes to connectivity.
G|Tech, Pagasus and ATTO are probably not bad starting points.
I’d also recommend talking to a specialist if this is what you do for a living. You should mention to him/her which applications are important to you (AVID/FCPX/Premiere), any codec/resolution/bandwidth expectations you may have.
My area is shared storage, so I can’t help much more, but I know that simplicity is golden and if you don’t have to get tangled up in networking then you you shouldn’t.
Try Bob Z. He’s probably able to help further and will give you more straight answers.
Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com -
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Talk to Bob Zelin (or search for his posts) regarding QNAP solutions. Anything with 10G networking and 8xHDD (or more) should be fine.
You can certainly build your own solution, but it’s probably going to take more time than you have to dedicate. If you absolutely have to DIY, consider FreeNAS and a mainboard with ECC memory.
One question…
If you work at home (on your own) do you really need shared storage? This might be adding a level of ‘complexity’ that simply is not required. If the answer is no, then I’d suggest a direct attached RAID of some kind. Ideally this would be something USB3/C/Thunderbolt that is designed for professionals. Choose RAID6* (not 5).
Whatever you buy, populate it with good quality drives. WD RED’s are fine, RED Pro’s are ‘better’. I like the HGST NAS, for what that’s worth, but fit the HGST Ultrastar 7k6000 when it counts. Either way, all drives fail and RAID isn’t a backup, so you must keep one.
* Not the final word on RAID, but it’s good enough for most people.
Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com -
> Who are the good manufacturers?
I’ve had good results from Samsung and Intel drives.
Most flash is manufactured by a handful of big players.
> Are there enterprise class SSD’s and what makes them different?
Yes.
Traditionally they have SLC type cells, which should (in theory) have greater endurance. You can google about the differences between SLC, MLC and TLC.
Some enterprise drives have firmware tuned for different workloads.
In reality it has proven very hard for consumer end SSD’s to be killed, even after writing many TB through them.
Most manufacturers supply comprehensive utilities to report cell wear and reallocation. On Linux you can use something like hdparm.
> What about failure rates and longevity?
I’d be as bold to say that you’re unlikely to completely kill a current or previous generation SSD… well not unless you are actually trying to, or do something wrong.
Performance over time probably has more to do with if the host environment has TRIM/discard support/effectiveness of the garbage collection. For some workloads you seldom see slowdowns – it just depends.
> What about archival use? How do they compete with LTO in that regard?
In tiered storage SSD’s usually sit in front of HDDs, which are sometimes in front of tape.
In my opinion they not really comparable ideas because tape robust in ways that SSD’s are not supposed to be.
Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com -
I don’t have much time to pick through all of this, but in an attempt limit any damage you might do…
RAID0 is not really used in production – it’s not at all safe because it has no redundancy. I’m not going to go into the specifics, you can google about the different levels available. It isn’t that complicated once you start looking. RAID5 (or preferably RAID6) is probably what you are looking for.
I don’t think that PERC6i card is up to much (very old), but it probably supports 5 at least, unlike whatever controller you have on board.
AFAIK HP and Dell usually ship very simple storage controllers on their motherboards. Most people don’t bother using these for any type of RAID, normally only for the passthrough of drives in AHCI mode. If you must use the on board controller choose RAID10, but it probably won’t do much for performance and you’ll only see 50% of the raw drive space usable.
Some other stuff…
* Use HDDs designed for RAID/24-7 use. They all fail eventually. *Don’t* use WD greens. RED is OK, RED Pro or HGST Ultrastar are better. None are perfect.
* Generally you’ll want the same model, firmware and capacity when constructing an array.
* DP = dual processor (probably)Overall what I’d do…
If you’re on a budget, look for an LSI 9260-8i from China via eBay – seem to be plenty available. If you have more money consider a new LSI, ATTO, Areca or Adaptec card – although these are not cheap, reliable high performance storage is not cheap.
The other budget card that works very well is the 3ware 9750-8i. At least one big shared storage company was shipping this card until at least the middle of this year and they work very well.
Depends how many drives your system can accommodate, but most of the 8i variations of these cards will allow you to attach upto 8 drives without an expander backplane in your server. Other than the card you’ll need a pair of mini sas to sata cables and some good drives (as mentioned above).
You can mail me off list if you are still stuck.
Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com -
This is tricky because you’ll be creating a new file for each transcode/conversion. Naturally new files get new creation dates…
I did some googling and you can use touch -r in a Linux based environment (and probably Mac OS) to retain some meta. It would be quite easy to write a simple bash script to automate this.
Here is some discussion:
https://superuser.com/questions/523286/how-to-make-handbrake-preserve-capture-time-creation-time/630622Funnily enough there is a git issue for Hand Brake about this very topic:
https://github.com/HandBrake/HandBrake/issues/51Whatever you do, I hope the files are on a solid backup somewhere. They sound priceless, so good luck and use the force 😉
Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com -
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The NAS way of doing this isn’t as bad as you think. There are lots of off the shelf products that will do what you want, but performance will be a big factor in making that decision.
The flash drive probably works on both because it is FAT formatted. This is writable on both platforms.
IMO your old Mac is really causing this issue. If you had a later release of the Mac operating system, then you’d be able to use exFat on both sides, which doesn’t have the file/volume limitations of old school FAT.
Is your Mac really running 10.5? I’d assume that makes it a PPC.
Storage Engineer
alex@indiestor.com