[John Davidson]

I was wrong. You need to uninstall it. Really large qt’s (larger than HD) were displaying at stupid-low resolution. I trashed prefs, checked interpretation, etc, with no luck. The large files would open and play great in finder, but looked nightmarish in a comp in AE.

I uninstalled the AJA Adobe plugins, and everything looks gorgeous again in comps. Whew.

[John Davidson]

Everything seems to work correctly (at least on our end) – it’s just some annoying ‘why does this happen’ thing, I guess. Are you not getting previews on your external monitor?

[John Davidson]

It’s fun to learn to do things for yourself. Maybe someone will make a “How to build a 7Tb RAID-5 for under $2k” tutorial on the Cow. I bet lots of readers would be very interested.

[John Davidson]

I just can’t see where $6900 for an 8Tb HDPro that you can’t upgrade yourself justifies the additional $4,700 over a fully upgradable solution. In my opinion, having done it and seeing how easy it was, the price-per gigabyte RAID model is outmoded, especially considering that Caldigit isn’t actually manufacturing super special drives that you can’t get anywhere else. Hitachi is Hitachi.

Further, in a few months (once the 2Tb drives are proven in the market), I’ll be upgrading my system to a 13Tb array – something I can’t do with Caldigit. Replacing the ram and hard drive in my old model macbook pro was harder than building this raid. Maybe buying Caldigit helps people sleep at night, but I could hire an engineer for two solid weeks for that markup. Sure, they test it. Sure, they have good support. It’s not like they’re going to come to my house and help me if I got screwed by a bad card or something. I’m not trying to insult Caldigit – but surely they realize that, unless they come out with some sort of super-unique solution like Holographic RAID storage or something unfailable and awesome, they’ll always going to have guys pop into their forum saying ‘can i use my own drives’ – and the answer is yes, but the official answer is no, and that’s why I didn’t buy it.

[John Davidson]

Lol, part of why I bought it was what he said in this thread, actually:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/197/855667#855669

-the part about “I’m hearing it’s terrific”, coupled with the fact that I already had a base knowledge of Highpoint’s interface (awful though it is) was what prompted me to buy it.

I really would have bought from CalDigit, but if I have to fake, lie, or follow an unorthodox path to use my own drives, well, no thanks.

Believe you me, if this card dies, I will make sure everybody knows about it!

Have a nice Sunday, sir!
j

[John Davidson]

Yeah, when I stumbled across that blog is really laid it out simply and didn’t scare the bejesus out of me. Kudos for you doing that on your own – you’re braver than me!

I’m really happy with this RAID though, it’s super-quiet compared to my old RAID and as long as you remember to power down the computer before shutting off the RAID, it’s pretty simple.

I do wish Highpoint would make a RAID management app or something a little better than that craptacular, difficult to understand web page management format. Oh, and responding to support email requests, but, I know that’s alot to ask. They can’t all be AJA….can they?

[John Davidson]

I have this setup.
ProAvio 8MS with mini-sas,
8 1TB Western Diginal Caviar Black Drives,
and the Highpoint Rocketraid 4322 (mini-sas).

I built the system about a month or so ago. Initially I had purchased Western Digital’s Enterprise class 2Tb drives, but those drives use this ‘intellipower’ feature which cause just enough lag to screw up HDCam layback, so I returned them for the 7200 RPM Caviar Black drives. That said, just yesterday Hitachi claimed to be shipping 2Tb drives and, if so, that’s pretty tight. I would still rather see benchmarks on these drives and let them ‘go out into the wild’ for a bit before I purchased them. After buying bleeding edge drives twice now, I’ve learned my lesson.

Regarding the comments to Highpoint, i’ve only used their cards for the last 4 years – so I have no other product knowledge to compare it to. I have never had a drive or RAID die on me using highpoint products. I have, however, run into situations where a card I had was no longer compatible with my OS (moving from Tiger to Leopard required a new controller card – Highpoint wouldn’t release drives for Leopard with my older card – that ticked me off). I did, however, run 4 400 gig hitachi drives in RAID 0 from 2004-present (the raid still works, I gave it to an employee).

With the 1Tb drives, the 4322 performs well. I run in raid 5 and my aja system test is routinely around 600 write and 500 read. There are little spikes and dips in the graph, but it’s fairly consistent throughout. For approximately 2k, I’m extremely please with this system that I built myself.

Mounting the drives is a fairly standard procedure. The Highpoint rocketraid interface sucks. The instructions are vague and you have to experiment with building it correctly.
For help on the navigating the interface, google this:
“super fast 4Tb raid for under 1500”

I will say I much prefer the mini-sas vs esata. It’s 2 cables vs 8 really short cables. If you can go the min-sas route, I say go for it. Highpoint’s customer service and support is non-existent. I would have purchased a CalDigit card, which everybody says are the best, but they get in a tizzy if you use somebody elses drives and enclosures, so I gave my business to Highpoint. David’s advice about the ATTO is probably dead-on, I have no knowledge of it, but I can tell you that it’s not the hardest thing in the world to build your own RAID these days. I saved some money and learned how to build a RAID array. That knowledge is invaluable.

Good luck!
John

[John Davidson]

I’m having this issue pop up as well. I wonder – do most people use this plugin or do they configure directly in the application?

[John Davidson]

I’m running an 8 drive DIY RAID5 using 8 wd caviar blacks, a highpoint rocketraid 4322, and a Pro Avio 8ms enclosure. Total cost about $2100 and it’s fairly easy to put together. I like the mini-sas connectors vs the e-sata mess of wires I used to deal with.

I don’t think we’re allowed to post direct links, but you can google
“echoblack pro avio”
and the how-to directions are the first thing to pop up. It was pretty dang easy.

[John Davidson]

Caviar blacks are great for RAID. I have 8 humming along right now. it’s the Enterprise and Green Power drives you want to avoid.