[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Lauren,

if you have exactly the same Raid systems lets say Pegasus 4bay, you can use the HD’s as back up.
Each HD must be labeled with the slot number it was used before.
If you refer to a different project you need to put the HD’s in exact the same slot number in your Raid system.
You have to swop the drives before you switch it on.
So labelling is very important.
We’ve done this for some time as a back-up, but it was too expensive (in our case).
You have to meet the HD specs of your Raid system. In our case this meant Ultrastars enterprise class Hd’s.
With 50 TB a year of expensive HD’s it was more expensive than double bach up on Deskstars.
You can do it, but you must be very precise in what you do.
When Promise change the Raid systems yo must be able to label the system and provide an enclosure for the old system.

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Lauren,

I would go for this plan:
You have one Raid system, which holds your current projects. It must be big enough to allow up to let’s say 5-10 projects, each around 3TB space. This means you need 30 TB raid capacity.
Once a project is finished you store it to a normal Harddrive. You have to keep record whats on your Harddrive and you have to label your harddrive.
A second harddrive with the same information is stored on a different place (in case of fire, or failure).
So you have a double backup of your data.
After double backup, you delete the project from the working raid.
This is how we do it. It is expensive and time consuming, but effective.
We haven’t lost any data within 20 years. Our current Raid system is over 120TB and we throw data of 50TB per year onto HD’s. Shooting on 4k means a huge responsibility to data.

I hope this helps,

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi David,

the Raid you’ve got is pretty good,
your computer you have got is not very good.
Using a thunderbolt raid on a USB connection is senseless.
The reason for a Raid system is to gain performance together with redundancy.
In your case you don’t get performace from your raid.
You can just plug a Sata Drive to the USB connection and you get as much performance
as from the Thunderbolt raid.

Cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Eric,

there is a compatibility list from Promise for the R4/R6.
You can use Sata HD`s from this list, all Drives used in your enclosure
must be the same.

Cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Mick,

yes, you have to use a new HD with exact the same Modelnumber. In your case it is a Hitachi Deskstar 7k3000, 2TB, HDS723020BLA642.
How old is your system? If it is 5 years plus, you should replace all drives. After ca. 50.000 hours running time, HDs reach the end of their lifetime. In your case, because you run your Raid probably on level 5 it could happen that during the rebuilt process another HD fails. In that case you would loose all data. I believe you have a back-up.
There is a compatibility list on the promise website for all drives you can use with your raid. But you can’t mix them. All drives must be the same.

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Greg,

this is rather a strange way you are going – I would call it the Gregs way.
Usually you have one solid raid with raid6 level plus one spare and a small san server system for the shared storage.
Back-up on external HDs, one of the HDs on a seperate place apart from your work.
You power problem is still there.
You need a smart ups system for example APC.
Our whole computer system incl. 4 Raid systems runs independently for ca. 1 hour in case of a power failure.
So we can shut down the system properly. In addition to that the ups “cleans” your power (constant voltage).

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Paul,

how did it go? Could you repair it, or did you had to format?

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Josh,

this is a problem concerning the FCPX forum. For your raid I would use raid6 level.
cheers,

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

hi Alistair,

alex gives you good advice. You are on the edge of a hardware raid. At least Raid5 level, better Raid6.
Internal software raids have their weaknesses. Apart from other topics it’s cooling, because Raids get hot. An external hardware raid has a lot of fans inside.
Enterprise HD’s are important, we use Hitachi Ultrastars.
Atto build one of the best hardware controllers.
I’ve never regretted the most expensive solutions, but the cheap ones, because I’ve thrown them away.

Cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi Michael,

the card you want to use works with a samsung controler software.
The box with the PCIx has a compatibility list of certain PCIx cards.
If you read the specs of the T-box carefully it says:
PCIe card must operate with no driver or have a Thunderbolt-aware driver
Please see the OWC PCIe Thunderbolt card compatibility chart for more information

I think this answers your question.
Perhaps the Samsung drive is supported in the future, or you could try another T-box.

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems