[Caspian Brand]

With 8 active users, you might want to consider a system with more physical disk drives and definitely more than a single shared GbE port.

Does the design team just work with stills or are they also doing video?

Will they have local scratch disks and just post finished work to the RAID/NAS?

You should also bolster the RAM on whatever computer you’re using to host this.

-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

I’ve never used the G-RAID myself. By your first post, I took it to mean the enclosure didn’t do hardware RAID 1. After having a quick read through the manual for the drive it appears the device is perpetually stuck in a hardware RAID 0.

It appears their G-RAID mini has a RAID 1 option, however.

Assuming you’re using this for video I would avoid Fat32 and use either MacDrive or Paragon Software’s HFS+ for Windows.

It looks like you won’t need the Apple Software RAID support with MacDrive Pro, so could likely get away with the standard version.

Both MacDrive and Paragon have trials available of their software.

Good luck.

[Caspian Brand]

Hey Kevin,

MediaFour has recently updated their MacDrive code to include support for Apple RAID partitions on Windows. This was previously only available in an older release circa Win2k, with their former Cross-Stripe edition.

Might be worth having a look at MacDrive Pro:

https://www.mediafour.com/products/macdrive/pro/

Or investing in an enclosure that does hardware RAID 1.

-Caspian

[Caspian Brand]

Hello Francois,

From your description it sounds like you might have your SAN volumes configured per suite. For FCP X, you might also want to consider using some volumes configured per project (if you aren’t doing so already). In this way a project can move from suite to suite as needed with write access to the media.

Regards,
– Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

Hello Jay,

It would be helpful to know a bit more about your environment so that we can better help you with these issues.

Please open a support ticket with us by sending an email to:

support@studionetworksolutions.com

Thank you,
-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

Hi Joris,

That QNAP 1279 looks decently spec’d for what it is (doesn’t look very expandable though). It very well may perform to your needs if properly configured for Video IO. You could build out such a solution using the QNAP and our globalSAN iSCSI Initiator for OS X ($89/seat) and iSANmp SAN management software ($199/seat) to create a low cost, simple, and very effective volume sharing SAN.

While our software can be purchased stand alone to build your own solution, it can alternatively be had as part of our turnkey EVO systems, with no per seat license fees. This solution starts at $13,999 USD for 8TB RAW, 2 x GbE Ports. This system can be expanded up to 32 disk drives and has two open PCIe HBA slots for adding more IO including: 4 port GbE Cards, Single and Dual port 10GbE cards, and 4 or 8Gb Fibre Channel Cards.

Using ProRes HQ you should expect to see up to 3 streams of video over a single GbE port (again assuming the storage is configured properly and the client load is balanced). Our iSCSI Initiator and our iSCSI Targets (EVO and globalSAN Xtarget) also support multi-pathing over GbE so you can use both built-in GbE ports on a MacPro connected to two ports of GbE on an EVO and get 200MB/sec of bandwidth.

Furthermore our Xtarget iSCSI software can turn your existing FW800 direct attached drives into iSCSI SAN volumes for use with iSANmp as well. Whichever computer (or computers) you want acting as Xtarget Servers would connect to the FW800 drives and then bridge them over iSCSI to be connected to by clients with globalSAN Initiator and iSANmp.

-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

I just experienced an epic fail with Sandisk Class 6 200x cards in my 60D… brand new out of the packaging and dropping frames left and right, een after low level formatting in the camera…My class 6 Transcend cards have yet to fail me…interestingly, the class 10 Transcend card I have always drops frames during the first 10sec or so of any recorded file, but is fine for the rest of the record.

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

How did you format your iSCSI LUN once you connected to it with globalSAN?
Did you use an Apple Partition Map when creating an HFS+ Volume?

I’ve used FCP X with iSANmp over iSCSI connecting to our own iSCSI Targets (globalSAN X series and EVO).

If you’re going to have more than one computer connect to the same iSCSI LUNs at the same time, you will also need to use SAN management software in order prevent file system corruption. We have our SAN management software, iSANmp, for iSCSI environments which is now less than $200 per seat.

-Regards,
Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

You can buy into an EVO starting at $13,999 for a short loaded 16 bay chassis with 8TB of RAW storage and two GbE ports (use a common GbE switch to share the two ports between more users depending on your bandwidth requirements, etc). From there you can add extra IO to build out an all Ethernet solution or a mix of Fibre and Ethernet, and scale up to 32 drives behind one controller unit.

-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Caspian Brand]

Christian,

To reiterate and further comment on Steve’s and Kyle’s comments, you really shouldn’t use desktop drives in a RAID array intended for high performance.

In addition to vibration dampening, and other environmental concerns, there are also various other commands and error corrections, reporting, etc., which Desktop model drives need to assume on their own, as they are their own ‘controller’ of sorts.

RAID Edition / Enterprise drives are also designed to better communicate with various RAID controllers so that both the drive and controller aren’t trying to control the same thing at the same time resulting in potential conflicts.

This is part of why some drive models and some firmwares work better with some controllers vs. others or not at all.

Some devices like the Drobo, are intentionally designed not to care as much about drive models, speeds, capacities, and firmwares in order to give the mass public more flexibility in redundancy. But this adversely affects performance in our Media Production environments.

That’s one of the reasons there are those of us here designing and selling these solutions, specifically designed for production needs.

Get some RAID Edition or Enterprise drives (there’s a good reason they cost more).

Best Regards,
-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions