[Darren D’agostino]

I don’t want 20 drives striped together. My point was the cost between SATA drives and network storage drives.

The file server would mainly be so I can easily share my project files between my 3 machines and also the boot of windows on my workstation and contain all files on each machine which is why I said it would be “like” a backup. I eventually would want an actual backup that was a mirror of the file server and a way to archive.

D

[Darren D’agostino]

Thanks for the info guys.

First off I do understand the complicated nature of these things but I cannot afford to spend $10,000 – $20,000 on a file server at the moment. Going the way of RAID seems like a good way because I can always add to the server when I need more space. And I don’t mean a RAID setup like in one of those big lacie drives, but a controller card + individual SATA drives that get striped.

Using those shared storage drives I don’t like the idea of either, especially Lacie. I had 2 Lacie F400 drives die on me and lost a ton of work. I actually still have them here so maybe one day I can restore some of the audio recordings on them. I currently use G-tech drives for backing up and storing uncompressed HDV footage and captured audio and the firewire 800 makes it fast enough to keep those on those drives while working on my workstation and loading the files into AE, Shake and FInal Cut.

From the other guys I know in the film, tv and game industries, they all suggest RAID setups using internal arrays and/or external chassis with a workstation which is where I’m leaning towards now for my workstation. I was assuming this could be done with a file server since SATA drives are very cheap compared to those network drives (SATA 7200 RPM around $120 for 1TB) and are very fast compared to SAS arrays for this type of work from benchmarks I have seen, at least on the Mac side. Is there something I’m missing about this when it comes to a file server because I could buy almost 20 SATA drives for $2,000 + add the cost of controller cards and chassis to house them, + the actual server + hardware firewall + wires and maybe a new power backup. I don’t see how that should reach $10,000 or more even if I spent $2,000 – $3,000 on the actual server and $2,000 on drives (which I wouldn’t need that many anyway).

I live in a small town in southern westchester NY, so no real good places here. I have access to New York City companies for IT and maybe in westchester there might be a good one, but given the size of the NYC there are so many companies it’s hard to know who is good and who is not and large comapnies who are probably reliable might cost a lot of money or not do small setups like mine. I do agree that spending $100/hour isn’t steep if it only takes a day especially since this is a small network for myself. Any larger jobs I work on I hire remote freelancers so it’s basically for the 3 machines I use here and no one else.

Incase I have been misled, or the people I know don’t understand networking enough, I wouldn’t mind using a Mac (desktop or Xserve) to be my file server. I could even use my old mac that is a Dual proc G5 (about 7 years old) as long as it would work between mac and windows. I could just buy a fresh disk as a boot drive, it already has 4 GB of RAM I think and I could chuck in some RAID cards and drives. If the hardware would be too outdated (no PCI-E in that one) I could even buy a lower model Xserve or the cheapest desktop apple offers.

Btw, Bob, if you do this sort of work, where are you located? Do you have a website / contact info?

Thanks

[Darren D’agostino]

Hi Bob, et al

Thanks for the quick responses.

Hire a professional what? Tech guy? Browse google again? Pull out the phone book and and point? Sorry for the sarcasm, can you be a bit more specific? I haven’t had much luck when hiring people for this sort of thing because it’s tough to know who is good.

I use primarily Mac, windows only for 64-bit apps when needed. I know guys who have linux systems setup that would help me do this, I just wanted a second opinion before I spent any money to see what options there are for me. I’ve been meaning to learn linux anyway (not that I’m thrilled about it) as I want to try out some of the high-end software I use to see if it fares better stability wise, such as Maya and Realflow. Considering I taught myself pretty much everything I do, I’m not too daunted about wrapping my head around linux, but have been warned about it’s differences from other OSs.

The main thing I was told was by several people was that it is not easy to setup a file server system where mac and windows can simultaneously read and write to the disks because their methods are different and something like samba needs to be used which is crap and doesn’t work well. Then they bring up linux and it’s stability, etc, etc. All hearsay to me which is why I’m posting this question. If it was common that things just worked out of the box, I would probably bite the bullet and just go buy an Xserve or 2, even old ones, plug in some wires, configure a few things and get back to work.

I don’t need shared video storage right now (although it would be nice) but I am definitely looking into something more than a single drive. I already have 4 firewire 800 drives and have had numerous 400 drives over the years fail which is why I want to move over to something more reliable as I fear my largest drive here may be reaching the end of it’s life.

As far as cost, I’m not scraping the bottom of the barrel here, I just don’t want to drop $5,0000 or $10,000 initially if I don’t have to and instead build something sturdy I can expand upon. So if I could get a setup for $2,000 – $2,500 and add to it as I need to, that would be ideal. Or build it in stages where this month I get the main node, next month increase it’s RAM, month after that I get the secondary backup, month after add more drives, hardware firewall, etc. And then add in extra nodes or Raid cards / disk arrays as needed.

I assume that for a file server that I would need (that is really more like a backup and gateway at this point) I wouldn’t need the latest and greatest processors, RAM, or SAS drives, and same goes for a second level backup. Just a sturdy system with enough RAM that is configured properly with 7200 RPM drives in a RAID 5 or 6 that is mirrored to another backup system and a bunch of gigabit ethernet ports.

And I had a question too about archiving but maybe I should leave that for another post.

thanks