[Andre Kelman]

HI Caspian,

Although I agree that getting a new batch of drives for our Xserve is important, it’s just not in our budget. All the drives on our Xserve are striped in a RAID 5 configuration so we don’t lose any data when one of the drives goes down.

-andre

[Andre Kelman]

Thanks for your reply Douglas,

I will reach out to Fibre Share and consult with them for sure.

We don’t really work over a network to access or edit any of the files on the Xserve. The 2 computer stations are both connected directly to the switch, and the switch is connected directly to the Xserve. All connections are over FIbre Channel. We never have to move the files to the computer first.

The Xserve is about 5 yrs old now and has a total capacity of about 6TB and uses IDE/parallel drives. I don’t think we will be upgrading the storage capacity anytime soon for budget reasons. When we edit or do any transcoding of our assets we usually read and write directly to the Xserve. Only one machine has write privileges at any given time. Both can read at the same time. I think this is a fibreshare thing.

When editing we usually work with SD material. Sometimes it’s DV, sometimes it’s 8-bit uncompressed, sometimes it’s Prores. We never edit uncompressed HD material as our machines are outdated and the data chokes up when playing back. This is true when the files are on the computer locally, playing back of the internal, non boot secondary hard drive. If we do, we have to convert it to a HD Prores codec first.

File conversions or transcoding is the real major reason we are upgrading one of the G5s. We usually get HD Prores files that need to be converted to SD 8 bit-uncompressed and it usually takes from 8-10 hours to convert, depending on the duration of the files. We are always on a tight schedule and a new Mac Pro will help us speed things up a bit.

-andre