Brett Sherman
Forum Replies Created
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[nuno baptista] “& if i remove one of the mirrored copies ( in Raid 1.. ) from the above enclosures & install it in any other enclosure i won’t be able to access the data in it ?”
That is very likely the case, because it is a hardware RAID. Even software RAID would not be a plug in and go operation. If you already have the enclosure and drives. Why not go with a RAID 1 + offsite spare strategy. You would be triple protected against hard drive failure and still have the offsite, separate drive backup. And Carbon Copy Cloner should work fine for this.
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I don’t have a lot of experience with RAID 1, so I could be wrong here. But in general RAID is tied to hardware. So if your enclosure ever breaks you are SOL. And you can never separate the drives and bring them back together again. Because they won’t be identical anymore. You are playing with fire when you separate RAID drives. They always need to stay together. And the drives need to be identical models. A mirrored backup eliminates those issues. It just seems to me RAID needlessly complicates what you’re doing which is rather simple. Remember syncing software will only copy what has changed since the last time, so it’s not that time consuming.
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I would question why you need RAID at all. People make the mistake of thinking RAIDs are a backup strategy, they are not. RAIDs are designed to maintain uptime in mission critical situations, that doesn’t sound like your situation. RAID 5s can boost performance and again that doesn’t sound like your situation.
The problem with RAIDs as a backup is that you can have file system failures (corruption, etc.) in this case both drives will be affected. You can have drive enclosure failures, RAID 1 won’t protect you here. You can have a fire.
My suggestion is to keep your Green Drives. Shift to single drive JBOD, there are cheap 4 bay JBOD enclosures for around $120 and run mirrored backups periodically. There is plenty of software that works well for this. Chronosync on Mac, SyncBack on PC. Then store your backup drive offsite (a friends house?) in a hard drive case when not syncing them.
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I’ve had nothing but trouble with the “toaster” style enclosures. I’d suggest getting one with a trayless slot.
https://www.datoptic.com/esata-usb3-usb2-fw400-fw800-sata-enclosure.html
or think about getting one with 4 trays.
https://www.datoptic.com/usb3-esata-four-tray-less-jbod-raid-enclosure.html
I also have some Icybox style enclosures and they work great as long as you’re not swapping drives a lot. THey are by far the most affordable option. There are many companies using the same hardware. THis is identical:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111203
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Agreed. Fortunately for me I rarely use keyframing because it was so terrible in FCP 7 also. I’m also not sure why you thought it was good in Avid, I thought it was atrocious there too. The only software I’ve ever used that comes close to being usable is AE, and even that could use a lot of help. I don’t know what it is about keyframing that no one seems to be able to get it right.
However, I can’t agree with the rant. I’ve never heard anyone “defending” keyframing in X. I think we’re all in agreement that is sucks. But, the notion that one aspect of the software (which I personally rarely would use anyways) makes it unusable I don’t think is right. Don’t like FCP X? Move on. The boons do outweigh the banes as far as I’m concerned.
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I have been working for awhile with Sparse Bundles. I haven’t noticed a big difference in speed. When I measure it, disk speed might go from 100 MB/s to 93 MB/s. For me that’s not a big deal. Management of projects is so much easier with Sparse Bundles and FCP X launching speed is A LOT faster. So I’m willing to trade off some speed. We’re also moving to centralized storage where Sparse Bundles will be necessary until Apple comes up with a better collaborative workflow.
I tend to have projects that primarily use one Event. However, I’m currently working on a Year in Review video that will pull from dozens of bundles. I don’t know if having multiple Sparse Bundles on the same drive negatively impacts performance.
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I don’t know how many hours I’ve saved just in the last 6 months I’ve been using X. Not having to redo edits because of FCP 7 crashes has saved me at least 15 hours in and of itself. Not to mention fewer dents in the wall when I chuck the mouse in anger.
It’s also interesting to recall the negative reaction of some plug-in developers like CoreMelt to the original release of FCP X. I can say that Lock and Load never worked in FCP 7 reliably – period. It was so bad I stopped using it. Well, it works like a charm in FCP X.
Unfortunately there remains a lot of vitriol against X. For some, workflows complaints are legitimate. But, I think a lot is people just like to hold onto their anger. As far as market share, sure I would like to see it gain market share at the Pro level. But, I don’t really care that much. There is robust development around X and it is not going away. I feel more secure in X’s future than I would in Avid’s.
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I guess I should say, I should start thinking about replacing all my archive drives over 5 years old. Which for me, means I will get around to replacing them in a couple years. 🙂 And I’ll start with the ones that are 10 years old.
These are drives sitting on the shelf that I don’t spin up much if at all. If they were active, I wouldn’t worry about it much since I would know when they fail and immediately make a new backup. And the costs to move them to new, larger capacity drives is not great in the scheme of things. Not to mention it reduces the number of drives I have to keep around because I can condense 5 500GB drives onto a 3 TB drive.
Since I work for an organization that’s been around for 100 years, I have to think more about archiving for historical sake. Most post houses don’t last long enough to worry about it. 🙂
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I’m not sure you can derive a whole lot from MTBF at all.
Look at table 2 in this study – https://static.usenix.org/events/fast07/tech/schroeder/schroeder_html/index.html
There is absolutely no correlation between MTTF and real world ARR. It seems that the take home lesson is plan to replace drives whether they are enterprise or desktop. This also reminds me I’d better start replacing my archive drives that are over 5 years old…
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Statistically, you can’t do that sort of multiplication with MTBF. If it were “Average Time Before Failure” maybe. But MTBF simply means half fail before, half fail after with no indication of the distribution of when they fail. So 50% could fail within 1 minute of plugging in and 50% could fail after 300,000 hours with the same MTBF. Theoretically of course.
I’m not sure it’s a conspiracy. But I definitely think manufacturers are generating the numbers that they want. If manufacturers wanted to provide more better reliability data, they could. DOA rates, failure within 1 month rates, Scan errors per X time, all of those would likely be more predictive of reliability. But the manufactures like MTBF because it indicates a staggered reliability from desktop to enterprise without indicating significant differences within the same class of drives. If it were meaningful every single model should score differently.