[Jacob Altman]

The switch I chose in the end is the SMC8024L2 made by SMC. It’s fantastic and is very fully featured and is performing perfectly. I ordered it from Provantage for $424.42…

Full report on our setup to follow.

Needless to say, it’s going well….

[Jacob Altman]

Sean,

Thanks a lot once again for your answers…
My kit has been ordered and is beginning to arrive… Will post up a full report when it’s all set up and has been tested extensively…

Cheers,

David.

[Jacob Altman]

Thanks for you input Sean, good to hear that Highpoint’s RAID 5 performance is good.

I’m actually going to go with two Highpoint X4’s (4 bay enclosures) with 400GB Western Digital RE2 drives in them.
I opted for the Small Tree 4 port card to go from the “Server” machine to the switch, and will probably go with an SMC 8024L2 switch as opposed to a Netgear one…

Two questions:

-Would I be better off trunking the built-in NIC with a cheap third party NIC, neither of which support Jumbo frames, or buying a Small Tree 1 port card that does Jumbo Frames, on the workstations ?

-Networking 101 sorta question: if I just used the built-in NIC to connect to the switch, how would I get the computers to connect to the internet… Can you have two network connections running simultaneously in OS X ?

Thanks in advance, any thoughts much appreciated.

[Jacob Altman]

Hi there Lance (and thanks to Shane for your answers),

Good to know I’m not alone on this one. I opted for Highpoint because they offer RAID 5, but if it’s not fast enough to sustain multiple stream of DV, I’ll have to go for your solution of 2 mirrored RAIDs.
A few important questions:

-What Switch have you decided to use ? As mentioned, I’d planned to use a Netgear Smart Switch (GS716T) which seemed to be a good balance between features and price. The peeps at Small Tree have told me the main concern here is latency, not bandwidth, but I just don’t have the money for their suggestion of a Foundry switch…

-Is there any speed/bandwidtth advantage in ‘trunking’ the built-in Ethernet card with a cheap third party single port card (Netgear GA311 for example), on the user’s workstations ?

Thanks in advance,
David

[Jacob Altman]

Shane,

Thanks for your response.
Could you clarify exactly what you mean, when you say it won’t support DV in RAID Protection mode (I presume you mean RAID 5).

Cheers

[Jacob Altman]

Thanks for your input.

So for a 2 seat mainly DV/HDV but sometimes single stream UC SD setup, do you think a Gb Ethernet feed with MetaSAN will do the trick ?

Thanks in advance.