Eric Hansen
Forum Replies Created
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hey rick
backup and archive are 2 different things. i could see using this box as a backup station, but i would never archive projects to it. RAIDs and hard drives in general are risky for long term archiving.
i’m not a fan of archiving to BD either. the shelf life is not proven. i have CD-Rs and DVD-Rs that are no longer readable. the CD-Rs i had were even “archive quality”. they barely lasted 10 years. BD is expensive. if a 25GB BD-R is $5, its about $.20/GB. LTO-4 tape is currently around $.04/GB with a shelf life of 20-30 years. a 2TB hard drive for $100 comes to $.05/GB, but like i said, i wouldn’t suggest hard drives for long term archiving
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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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hey Gerardo
you’re jumping into a thread over 3 years old. you’re also asking about a certain aspect of cinematography that has jumped by leaps and bounds over the last 3 years. i could get into this, but many people in your budget range are buying video DSLRs to achieve 35mm depth of field, such as the Canon 5D and 7D. the cameras you link have 1/3″ sensors, which won’t give you the 35mm depth of field.
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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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hey rob
i saw your post yesterday, but thought i would wait a day until Bob weighed in.
you didn’t mention in your original post what you want to use your SAN for. both Bob and Caspian made the point that if you’re building a SAN for video editing, you’re not going to get everything on your wish list in one package. a Drobo fulfills most of your requirements, as long as speed is not one of them. the DroboElite can be configured with iSCSI and has 2 Gigabit ports, but i wouldn’t do much more with it than use it as an NAS for documents and other small files, and maybe an iTunes library. i’ve heard it works well for backup and use with Time Machine. but anything else will overwhelm it. it’s amazing what a Drobo can do (the first time i read about it i was blown away because it broke so many “rules” of RAID management). but that management comes at a price of complex software and speed. their marketing has made people think that they can have it all. they can’t.
so please, post back with more details on what you’re trying to do with your SAN (not what features you want) and we’ll try to point you in the right direction.
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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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Pro Tools is a strange beast when it comes to using storage. our PT system only push/pulls files from the ethernet SAN. it has it’s own RAID-1 drive over FW800 for mixing.
coming from video editing, i’m really leery of partitions. mostly because it’s a real pain to modify them without bringing the whole system down and erasing everything. at my current facility, we created 4 partitions on the 2 RAIDs on the SAN and broke them up so each partition was used by each editing system. well, this didn’t work as we would have 3 edit systems working on the same project, or editors moving around to different edit systems. when we got a 3rd RAID, i changed it to 3 volumes for the 3 RAIDs with no partitions. as the projects come in, they are placed onto the volume with the most free space. using partitions to create virtual walls in the storage was just over complicating things for everyone.
i would only do it if there’s performance or compatibility reasons
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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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hey Adam
are you really getting 220-230 MB/s (not Mb/s) when using bonded ethernet lines between 2 computers? in my experience this does not work and i’d love to know how you’re able to achieve this.
instead of using iperf, can you use AJA System Test, or move a multiple GB ProRes file from one computer to another and look at it using something like Activity Monitor?
thanks
e
Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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i would like to add one thought to the one big volume vs multiple volumes debate:
if you’re working with multiple projects, it’s not that difficult to spread them on different volumes. we do this for all the different TV shows we’re working on. we have 3 RAIDs which show up as 3 volumes. when we add another RAID, we’ll just make another volume available to the editor as Volume 4.
as the administrator, the nice thing about multiple volumes is the option to take them offline occasionally for maintenance, without affecting editors working on the other volumes. if a drive fails in a RAID and it then slows down to do the rebuild process, it doesn’t slow the entire SAN down. it will just slow down the one volume associated with that RAID. or if i need to defrag the RAID, i can take that one volume offline so it can be defragged (or erased) without bringing the whole SAN down.
even if OS X allowed us to grow the Volume as we add more RAIDs, i wouldn’t do it. for maintenance and overall system performance reasons, i recommend multiple volumes with 1 RAID per volume.
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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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hey John
i may be totally wrong, but this is how it’s been explained to me. if you take 2 links and bond them together and connect 2 computers directly (no switch in between), it will work as you describe. you don’t get twice as much speed. you don’t get 2 connections. you’ll only get one connection and the other one is there for redundancy. i don’t know of anyone that’s doing this.
our Ethernet RAID systems rely on a switch that can handle this link aggregated bond, which then doles out the individual connections to the computers. so 4 ethernet lines from the server to the switch will result in 4 independent links coming out of the switch.
yes, you can just connect a computer directly to the multiport ethernet card and you will get a direct connection. i do this with mobile editing servers (6 port card feeding 6 editing stations with no switch). the downside is that the shops that i build these SANs for typically have more computers than they do ports on the server. so having the switch helps to make sure the computers that currently need the bandwidth are getting it.
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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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i vividly remember the day Xserve RAID was axed. i was ordering one (maybe 2) and my Apple Enterprise account exec said, you know, we’re discontinuing these things. but, we got this RAID from a company called Promise and it won’t be ready for a few months.
so i cancelled the order and delayed the Xsan installation i was doing for a few months. i couldn’t go until the Promise boxes were ready. i wanted to wait because the Promise RAIDs could do things that we had all been asking for and the Apple RAIDs couldn’t i understood why Apple canceled. what bugged me, still does, is that they never give a roadmap for their enterprise stuff, which is extremely annoying.
so the difference here is that Apple already had an option ready to go when they axed Xserve RAID. but here, theres no replacement. a Mac Pro is definitely inferior. with Lion on the horizon, i do wonder about the future of OS X Server.
i don’t like speculating on the CreativeCow board. i know it annoys some people and it’s not productive. but it’s just one more thing Apple is doing in their move from high-end to consumer. as a member of this specific SAN Networks forum, and a FCP user, i’m even more worried about Apple implied direction.
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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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thanks bob. this happened to me the other day and i should have posted about it here. stupid that i don’t follow my own advice when it comes to upgrading critical systems. nice to see ATTO is on top of it. yet another reason why they’re the best!
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Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv
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hey bob
if it’s USB 2.0, then won’t it only do like 25MB/s anyway? GigE at 1500 MTU maxes at like 60MB/s and GigE at 9000 MTU is like 90-100MB/s. wouldn’t a Jumbo Frame enabled USB network adapter be pointless anyway?
i do see the advantage to having a second ethernet port on an iMac. all my installations with iMacs and Mac Minis use Airport as the second connection. so this would be faster than Airport. but it seems like Jumbo Frames is a feature that USB wouldn’t be able to take advantage of anyway.
thanks
e
Eric Hansen – http://www.erichansen.tv