getting a huge drive array

I want to get a 4 - 8 bay hot swappable raid (4tb or better). I saw some stuff online and i wanna know what you guys think about these companies. BTW, i want to use hitachi and seagates (enterprise )

Narco - makes a 4 and a 6 bay.
Caldigit - makes a 4bay - i have had power suply problems from the 2 i have
Seagate - makes 4 to 12 bay

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

This is probably more than your looking for - [www.infortrend.com]

We have one of these and will be getting another in the next couple of months. When we purchased the first RAID we must have had 15 to 20 Lacie drives connected to three FCP work stations. It was a mess and difficult to find the assets you needed when you needed them.

We originally started looking for a 4 to 8 bay tower we could stripe RAID0 but after researching it a bit more we decided to spend the extra money and purchase a fiber channel RAID. It is obviously more expensive but we were able to layer a level of file system management (Fibersoft) that really improved out efficiency.

A lot of people will argue that you may not need this level of performance but once you have it you can't ever imagine how you got along without it. We're currently putting on and taking off four to five TB's a month of new work and we keep about five to six projects online. There's no way we could do this over firewire.

Of course if you only have one workstation then a standalone RAID enclosure might be the right answer. Since we started using this infrastructure we have added three more workstations and will probably add a couple more shortly. We didn't plan on growing this fast but it all works so much more efficiently that the growth has been quite easy.

One of the biggest problems we're confronted with now is archiving.

I just puchased an array from Maxx Digital - 8tb. Very solid unit. Not sure if it is hot swapable.

chuck what did that run you$?

it is a bit heavy but i can sense growth in the air.
My idea was to have a 6-bay 3 running some undecided raid 2 JOBD and 1 whos fate will be latter decided maybe assets.

i saw the 3.5' seagate 1.5 drives and i could get 4.5t out of those 3 raid-X. i could do the same with a 5-bay or a 4-bay.

i have about 3tb now and i have archived a lot of footage to dvd or small drives. If i add those i would say i have 7tb.

i would like to archive less times and have 2tb open and ready.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

check out the Drobo... they are advertising on the left of this forum. They have a great product. I'm looking to get one myself.

Um...Drobo is no good for editing video. It is meant for protected back-up only.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

However, crayons are. Especially the 64-piece boxes.


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You format elitists are getting on my nerves. Why just a few years ago all we had were the 8-crayon boxes, and we made pretty pictures on them just fine!

You sick little monkey!


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Joe, i remember you having a raid5 set-up. What company made the unit you using for storage?

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

[www.lafcpug.org]



www.strypesinpost.com

Anyone that experiences any issue should contact the company they bought the product from immediately. We're always happy to help with any technical/support issue.

Someone indicated a problem with a 4 bay product we had, "Caldigit - makes a 4bay - i have had power supply problems from the 2 i have"

We've only been shipping our 4 bay HDElement for less than a month & that I'm aware of none of the 1U high quality power supplies has had a single issue. Perhaps you experienced a problem with the now discontinued S2VRHD (5 bay), while that would be unusual, we'd be happy to replace any failed component.
All you need to do is call us, we answer our phones.

Also always remember to use a UPS, no matter who's storage your using, think FAILSAFE.

There was also mention of a "me too" storage solution above that doesn't manufacture their own product, I'd be wary. They use a 3rd party controller card & that means multiple vendor support in the mix. Good luck if you need support there. Our engineering, design, development & support are all done in house. We manufacture our own product & support it 100%, and we're nice people too.

Jon
you do make a great drive. when i did have a problem with the power supply you guys were "johny on the spot" with the support, and to my surprise you replaced the part in under 24hrs. WOW

I will probably go with the 4 bay calD i saw on the website. As i have narrowed it down to g-tech and calD.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Hi J,

Sorry I didn't get back to you sooner. Sounds like you might be close to making your decision.

I think we spent approximately $25K for 16TB's of managed storage. That price included the Fiber channel switch, five FC host bus adapters, FiberJet file system, and enough fiber to install five system in a 2500 square foot office.

I divided the decision to grow our company into two key issues:
Making our workflow more efficient to increase capacity and throughput.
And image quality so we could create a look that we felt we could charge more for, or at least hold the line and not have to discount to win business.

What I learned through this upgrade was that having managed storage improved our ability to easily find and share assets between editors, compositors and graphic artists so much that it really increased our creativity. No more copying and waiting for files. So we were able to meet both objectives.

There was such a cost associated with the movement and management of data that, until we resolved it, went largely unnoticed. We just grew into this mess of hard drives. Obviously HD exacerbates the problem.

Again this isn't for everyone, but if you plan on working with multiple artisans on multiple systems across multiple projects you should seriously consider this type of workflow. It is more expensive but the benefit of it far outweighed the cost of it.

For us its a mixed blessing, yesterday I went to look at an additional 3500 feet of office space...