[Jesse, Dijifi]

Okay, at some point this summer I am giving this a try. Thank you again for all the helpful information. I really appreciate it guys.

[Jesse, Dijifi]

Oh cool! Okay, I will look into this.

Alex, do you think someone with pretty basic knowledge of networking could set this up without too many problems? I build our computers from parts, so I know a fair amount, but am no expert in networking.

Again, infinite thanks for your input on this. All of you.

[Jesse, Dijifi]

Thanks Bob.

You are right, although I have a very unique situation in which (according to the manufacturer of my capture machine and accompanying software) I must first capture these huge files to an internal drive of what I will call the ‘ingest’ station (of which there are two). The capture of 8mm/16mm film to digital files will apparently not work if I attempt to capture directly to shared storage or anything not directly connected to the motherboard of this ingest system (the reasoning I don’t completely understand, but the manufacturer assures me it is so).

So, I at least have to have internal arrays for the initial capture. And since I only need to edit on one station, and in the past have tolerated the time it takes to transfer from one station to the other, I just went with the more affordable G-Speed eS array which achieves up to 500-600 MB/s on the local system. I figured if the network were fast enough it could talk to the other two machines at at least over 100 MB/s since they are RAID 0.

So this direct connect method is very interesting to me. Though I don’t know if it can direct connect two stations to a third station, rather than one to one.

[Jesse, Dijifi]

Again, thanks to you both!

Interesting, regarding the direct connection (though I need to connect 2 ‘media ingest’ stations to a 3rd editing station, not just one to one here). We are on Windows machines only, by the way.

And yes, it seems I must have a pretty horrible speed then, even though our switches and desktops support 1 Gbps. I’ll have to try jumbo frames and see what kind of improvement takes place. 90 MB/s might be enough for our purposes, though 100-200 MB/s for a $550 investment in each of the 3 stations may pay for itself in the long run. I am also able to add extra drives I have available to increase the RAID 0 arrays of the two ingest stations, which I will do soon.

[Jesse, Dijifi]

Wow, thanks so much Steve and Alex. This is really interesting information, though a lot of it is over my head.

From what I can tell, 10 Gbps products are extremely expensive, so it seems this is not an option for me. I was hope to spend less than $1,000 on simply speeding up my network between stations, but it seems this is currently too new of a technology.

I will certainly try the jumbo frames, and will consider the other options for a while.

Thanks again, you’re heroes!

[Jesse, Dijifi]

Thank you Bob and Alex,

Yes, I was just wanting to increase our network bandwidth. Capturing and editing to an actual SAN is supposedly not acceptable by the machine we use and its accompanying software (which requires that we first capture a raw file, then run frame pulldown on the captured file to produce the final file that we are editing): https://moviestuff.tv/8mm_sniper_hd.html

Plus, we don’t necessarily need a SAN since we are only editing on one machine, not multiple.

And DiJiFi is the name of my company! (https://www.dijifi.com)

[Jesse, Dijifi]

Oh, okay. I think so.

From what I read before it seemed that link aggregation could double or triple the bandwidth of gigabit ethernet between a switch and a storage array. I thought maybe that connection could be made between a switch and multiple desktops (and their attached storage arrays), but I guess it has to be a standalone storage array designed for link aggregation?

So just to be clear, there is no way to use link aggregation on the client end in order to increase bandwidth?

Thanks for your help!

[Jesse, Dijifi]

Thanks David, I actually figured out what the problem was AFTER returning the Sans Digital tower. I had a bad disk!

For those looking for a cheap RAID 5 setup, the external Sans Digital tower would probably have done the trick, but I ended up using a $90 iStarUSA 4-drive RAID cage inside my tower for external access to the drives in the front, and paired it with a $120 HighPoint RocketRAID 2300. Filled it with 4 2TB drives from Samsung for $90 each.

Bought everything from Newegg, and I am getting ~140 MB/s now, which is more than enough for my purposes. Gives me 6 TB of usable storage and some redundancy with RAID 5. And I’m paying less than $600!

Anyway, hope this helps anyone out there on a budget.

Jesse