[Tom Grant]

It seems to work pretty well. No major issues so far. Right now we have it in a RAID 10 config (8 TB usable of 16 TB total). It’s certainly speedy, which is great. I’m able to transfer ~100 GB of video in about 15 minutes, which, if I’m calculating correctly, works out to about 900 Mb/s, and I have yet to run into any lag, jitter or frame-drops when running four simultaneous 50 Mb/s video streams with a discrete audio channel in Final Cut X with some relatively basic graphics I created in Motion.

The only thing that’s concerning is that when we first set it up, I turned off the G-tech before shutting down the computer. Even though I properly ejected it, like I would a typical external drive, when I turned off the enclosure, I received tons of errors and alerts that I had disconnected the enclosure improperly. It caused the RAID to fail and I had to rebuild it from a backup.

This is mildly concerning to me since the system is used by a group of people, and all of us are beginners, so I don’t want someone to accidentally turn off the enclosure and cause the RAID to fail again. I’m a little amazed to be honest that something like this is not dealt with properly by the ATTO card, but that’s probably just my ignorance about the subject.

Other than that problem though, the ATTO seems to work well. The set up is simple, even for a beginner like me, and rebuilding the RAID is straight forward. It took less than a day to rebuild the 5 TB (actually 10 TB including the mirror) when the RAID failed

HTH,
Tom

[Tom Grant]

Am I? I don’t mean to sound angry. My last reply as a thanks to Bob was very genuine. His was a very helpful response and I didn’t mean it to sound sarcastic in any way.

My initial response to Bob I’ll agree was a little curt, but not angry.

[Tom Grant]

Thank you all for your responses, particularly Bob for your very thorough and extremely useful response.

While I would’ve gone with Pegasus, since it seems like it’s exactly what we need and in our price range, it unfortunately only comes with Thunderbolt, and I have a Mac Pro which doesn’t have Thunderbolt, so I can’t use it. So I’ve decided to go with the G-Tech 16 TB G-Speed eS Pro with the ATTO SAS RAID Adapter in a RAID 5 configuration. I’ll post here after using the product to give interested people my opinion.

Thanks,
Tom

[Tom Grant]

Was my question really that bad to warrant such a tactless response? I tend to not use forums simply because I find that enough research reveals that other people have already answered the question. I’ve only posted on Creative Cow once about two years ago for another newbie question. I’ve perused Creative Cow hundreds of times finding useful answers to questions and my inability to answer my own question this time was simply a result of the lack of a consensus of opinion from various different people, including many forum answers not on Creative Cow, and not laziness or incompetence. I thought that maybe the different answers were partly due to the variety of user needs and each case is unique. So I thought I’d post my question on a forum where I know I’d get recommendations regarding my specific needs from experts far more knowledgeable about a topic that, I must say, is quite daunting for the uninitiated. But I will attempt to improve my question with more detail regarding the research I’ve performed, which I initially left out simply because my post was already quite lengthy, which this one now is.

While I’m not specifically asking for a brand recommendation, though if anyone has experience I’d appreciate the insight, what I’m more asking for is advice on my specific set up. As I mentioned, my research has resulted in many conflicting views based on individual user experience. I need something flexible for future expansion, but as turn-key as possible since I don’t really know what I’m doing in terms of configuration. I need something reliable that I wont have to spend much time, if any, troubleshooting, something that I won’t have to mess with more than replace a drive every 6 months or so, because I simply don’t have the time. I’ve read up a lot on Drobo, Pegasus and Synology systems to see if any of these would work for me, as well as on various RAID configurations, but am still unsure which, if any, is best for my needs. To give some perspective, when I say I am unexperienced in all this, I mean that as of two months ago I didn’t know what RAID was or that it even existed, so I’ve spent much time researching just to figure out what question I needed answered in the first place.

I was initially very interested in Drobo as advertised, since it seemed like it was exactly what I needed: easy to use, flexible, reliable. Unfortunately, what I found by reading hundreds of reviews online was that while many people said it was great, just as many others experienced not only drive failures during initial setup (which is not necessarily Drobo’s fault), but failures of the Drobo unit itself, plus many people said it was too slow for video editing. The consensus seems to be that while when it works, it works great, it doesn’t always work. Plus the idea of a proprietary system seems somewhat dangerous to me and many others.

Many of those disenchanted by Drobo have turned to Pegasus since it’s based on conventional RAID and seems to be much speedier. Downsides seem to be a slightly more difficult setup procedure, less flexibility in terms of swapping disks, and capacity limitations (<12TB, however that should be enough for what I need), and I couldn’t find a version with USB3, only thunderbolt, which is useless to me since I have a Mac Pro and can’t add thunderbolt, but I can add USB3 with a PCIe card.

Synology may be more reliable, but it also seems to be the most difficult to set up out of the three. I would like to make sure the reliability of my storage isn’t dependent on my limited knowledge of proper configuration.

In terms of less turn-key solutions, I’d be happy to set up a RAID 5 configuration, RAID 10, or RAID XX if others thought that I, a capable but ignorant consumer, would be able to accomplish such a feat. Do RAID set ups like this tend to be more or less reliable than something like Drobo? How about for a knowledgeable IT guy to set up vs. someone inexperienced such as myself?

I have read that many people prefer to have an online backup solution, so what are people’s opinions on that considering the ~25 – 50 GBs/week of storage I’d require?

Thank you all for reading such a long post and for your thoughts.

Tom

[Tom Grant]

Wow, what a difference a hard drive makes. I plugged in my new 7200rpm HD using the eSATA port and it’s blazing. Nothing is hanging up, Premiere only takes about 2 or 3 minutes to load the entire 25GB projects and I can render in real time. Thanks for all the advice everyone!

Tom

[Tom Grant]

Thanks for the advice. I decided to go with the 2TB OWC Mercury Elite-Al Pro. It’s 7200rpm and has an eSATA port and 2 firewire 800 ports, so I can daisy chain if I need to in the future. Its got 32 MB of cache, but I’m not familiar enough with hard drive specs to know if that’s good or not or even relevant for what I’m doing. I got an eSATA PCIe card for my MBP to be able to get the most out of the drive. We plan on doing three of these 25GB projects a week, so I figured I might as well get it now.

My MBP does have a 512MB discrete graphics card in addition to the 256MB integrated card, but I’m not familiar with how the shared memory fits into this, could you explain a little more?

Thanks for all the help!

Tom

[Tom Grant]

Thanks for all the input guys. I would have never thought that an external drive would be faster than an internal one, but I can see why now. I actually have all the files on an external drive but then would transfer them to my internal one because I assumed it would be faster. Newbie mistake I guess. I tried it using the source on an external 1TB drive, unfortunately I only have USB2 at this point, but it does speed it up significantly. Not quite enough for me to be able to render, but I can at least chop it up into smaller bites now and work on them individually.

I am looking into another drive though, since I’m at about 75% of my 1TB. I have my eye on one that has an eSATA port in addition to two 800/400 ports and a USB2, but its a little more pricey than I would like. Will the eSATA option be significantly better than just a firewire 800, or can I settle for the firewire with files this size? In the future, if I don’t have to chop up the files, I would rather not because I have to match up a separate audio track to the video and having to do it a half dozen times or so for one project would be pretty time consuming. I’d rather just do it once.

Thanks for all your help and quick replies!

Tom