[Ericbowen]

Yes I have sold and tested several up to the 8800Pro V2. I have not tested the 12 or 16 bay units yet. The 8800Pro V2 was quiet compared to most SAS chassis units I have worked with other than 8 bay SAS tower units from Enhanced Technology/Pro Avio. I have tested Qnap but not Synology. I was not impressed with Qnap considering the cost. Synology is the current IT standard used in Enterprise. I wouldn’t mind testing one if I get the chance. I agree that so far Thecus is the best overall.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

Alex I was surprised as you are when I was testing this and dealing with clients with a raid 10 on the rebuild times. I about fell over with the onboard Intel raid 10 rebuild times. I had always assumed the same as was it normally published. However the results were as I stated and I never received a valid response when I emailed engineering. My assumption was the rebuild time was extended because of the priority % assigned to each function for background processing. However when I changed that it did not effect the results much at all. The Raid 3 Rebuild times of Areca were 27 hours for a 6 drive raid 3 with 1 TB Samsung drives. When we asked as to why it took so long their response was the drives were not enterprise. Their 8 Drive 16TB raid took 9 hours with Enterprise drives. Keep in mind that is still 3 or more hours longer than the same Raid on the Intel controllers. I will try and test again next week and see if the newer controllers/drivers/firmware have changed things. It’s been over a year since I tested it specifically here outside of dealing with clients.

I agree the software raids are reporting far better rebuild times than even Areca controllers with the current systems. I am starting to consider looking into software options. If you have some recommendations for Windows systems that you approve of and support, let me know.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

Those are the testing results I have done here with Intel or Areca Raid cards. There have been clients I deal with that have the same results and they did not buy the system or raid from us. When I state Rebuild I mean the failed drive which is the same for the parity raids. I simply state as rebuild array because the state of the array is in degraded state until the rebuild is finished. Hence the term rebuild array. There have been postings on the Adobe forums regarding Areca, Intel, and onboard rebuild results. I believe they were comparable or even longer than what I have reported. As to the drive count, 8TB to 16TB array was covering 4 to 8 drive raid arrays. Obviously less than that wont work with those raids.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

Hello. The Thecus units have good performance via iSCSI and very easy management tools. The Build Quality is good and reliability has been excellent with zero failures so far. The 8800Pro V2 or higher with PCI-E 8x expansion slot is a key feature most Nas/iSCSI units don’t have and they have finally added support for almost all of the Intel 10GBE Ethernet cards to the firmware. I cant say enough how much of a game changer that is for small business with today’s bandwidth requirements climbing on the 2K+ workflows. Couple those with the Inexpensive Intel 1 or 2 port 10GBE network cards and the sub $1000 Netgear 10GBE network switches and you have a blazing 10GBE network based multiclient editing solution ideal for small business with a far lower investment cost than Fiber especially considering the infrastructure costs differences. I would also like to say Thecus support is good and has been very responsive to clients. I recommend them to any clients looking for different network storage options regardless of where they are purchased.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

Try running this on that USB2 HDD.

select the start button
type cmd in the search
at the command prompt type the following. The drive letter would be the drive letter of the USB2 drive

chkdsk drive letter /r
then hit enter
example – chkdsk d: /r

Let it run the low level check disk and lets see if that cleans up the table on the drive.

I will email you directly.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

Do you have the Media Cache files on the OS drive or did you move them to another? Is the Media Drive formatted HFS+ Journaled or Non Journaled? If the media drive is formatted with Journaling, please grab an external HDD and format it Non Journaled. Copy a file from the Red Camera media over to that drive and then try the import again. Make sure the Media Cache folder is also on the Non-Journaled drive. See if that changes the results.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

I have a couple ideas but some questions first. Is this Windows or OSX? Do you have it plugged in USB3, USB2, or E-sata? How do you have the drive formatted? If Windows platform, do you have Mac Drive installed?

Yes I do have experience with PC editing system both video and audio since that is what we configure/build. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

Have you tried AE or Prelude yet? Is this OSX or Windows?

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

Have you looked into 10GBE Adapters from Small Tree? Couple those with a DAS SAS system on the Mac that Alex suggested and you will have far better performance than a NAS system for multiple clients. Protocol streamlining only offers so much performance gain. You can get very affordable 10GBE switches with these

https://www.netgear.com/business/products/switches/prosafe-plus-switches/XS708E.aspx#

https://www.small-tree.com/Intel_Based_10_Gb_PCIe_Dual_Port_Copper_10_Gb_Et_p/petg1-cat6a.htm

https://www.small-tree.com/Intel_Based_10_Gb_PCIe_Dual_Port_Copper_10_Gb_Et_p/petg2-cat6a.htm

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager

[Ericbowen]

Raid 10 can be run on today’s onboard controllers or as a software Raid without the larger drawbacks the Parity raids have on those same configurations. However Raid 10 does have some drawbacks that parity raids, especially raid 6 don’t have. One of the biggest problems today is drives failing over time rather than completely at once. This often causes data corruption over time. If you have a raid 10 and the mirror is corrupting over time while the primary disk fails, then you will rebuild the data corruption into the replacement disk. This seems like something that would not happen accept once in a blue moon. Well the more Disks you add the greater the likelihood. Look online at clients who are losing entire raid volumes to data corruption of the raid. Even Raid 5’s are seeing this. Raid 6 gives 2 levels of parity which allow parity verification to catch this corruption when it occurs and fix it. A SAS Raid Controller will also often mark the drive out as bad when these errors reach a certain level rather than let the problem progress further.

Another major reason to look at Raid 5 or 6 is the rebuild times. Contrary to what others are posting, the current algorithms/methods for rebuilding Raid 5 or Raid 6 is by far the most efficient taking the least amount of time. The reason is the controller is pulling rebuild data from ALL the other disks at 1 time instead of just the mirror. This significantly shortens the rebuild time. The largest factor to rebuild times though are the controllers themselves. An onboard raid controller will take 48+ hours to rebuild a 8TB to 16TB raid volume. A Lower end High Point controller will take about the same time. A real SAS controller with an LSI chip, good drivers, and firmware like LSI or Intel cards take 3 to 6 hours to rebuild a Raid 5 or 6 volume. Those same controllers take 9 hours to rebuild a raid 10. A Areca controller takes around 8 to 10 hours to rebuild that same Raid 5 or 6 with good firmware. The previous firmware was taking 20 to 27 hours to rebuild. All of this seems less important as reason to pay far more for a raid setup until you see the current drive failure rates and have to wait 2+ days for your extremely important raid to rebuild. Often in that case it’s better to just wipe redo and restore from a data backup from the closest date. However excellent raid controllers like the LSI or Intel really alleviate that.

A final note is Raid is never bullet proof. It is a 90% effect layer of protection. That is it. There are many ways to lose a raid so always back up your data off line as well. I hope that helps with the raid questions.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager