Have you used either of these RAID 5 enclosures?

I'm starting a graphics intensive project and I need a low-cost RAID 5 enclosure. If you've had experience with either of these please give me a thumbs up or down. These are the two I'm considering:

OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2
[eshop.macsales.com]

Stardom SOHO RAID
[eshop.macsales.com]

I'm tending toward the OWC since I'll be able to call them for tech support if need be. Also, anyone know if Avid's drive filtering will accept these?

Thanks,

-Russ

Stardom SOHO RAID - yes. I do not recommend. I had a lot of problems and returned it. OWC has hooked me up in every way to date. I buy most of my stuff from them now.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I've been using the OWC Mercury Elite Pro Qx2 for about nine months, exclusively in RAID0 pairs. Decent performance, good price. No problems yet. But two gripes I had:

1. The OWC sales guy gave me wrong information. I was looking for a unit that could accept both RAIDed drive pairs and also use drives in single JBOD configuration. The sales guy told me the Qx2 could do it. It cannot.

2. The door is horrible. You can only pull the key out of the lock if it's in locked mode. Which means if you lock the door, pull the key out and the key is lost, you can't access the drives. I actually took the lock apart because I was so frustrated with it, and I'm using the door just as a cover now. What's the point, anyway, of putting a lock on a unit that's light enough to carry off in your arms wholesale?


www.derekmok.com

Thank you, guys.

Derek, I had a feeling about that lock when I saw the picture of it and you just confirmed that. Seems like a good unit otherwise.

I purchased the OWC Qx2 for a client as an inexpensive RAID 5. I found in that application it did not work for them. The RAID controller in that unit is spiky with frequent slow downs in performance. As a result we had a lot of dropped frames. Annoying on playback, but a disaster on record.

To their credit the OWC folks were incredibly helpful. They took the unit back and applied the cost to this combo, which has been working really well for us.

[eshop.macsales.com]
[eshop.macsales.com]

I see that they are sold out of the specific model of the card we used, so call and ask them what they recommend. They are very helpful.

Although they sell this primarily for rack mount applications, it does come with feet if you want to put it on a desktop.

Hmm... The rocketraid card... It is pretty fast, but I seem to have occasional issues with it. Recently i had a raid go down for a while during a file transfer. For some reason it came back on after I tried to repair disk permissions (but failed to). The amount of free storage was bordering close to 10%, so that could be the issue, although I have never had a raid 5 display such quirks. Occasionally I see a codec not installed error when scrubbing through the timeline on a composite shot in FCP. This happened even after we replaced the raid controller and array.



www.strypesinpost.com

I hadn't considered SAS, but that's a surprisingly low price for an SAS enclosure and the performance potential is impressive. I've heard enough discontent with Highpoint's cards that I'll probably steer clear of that. Atto cards are out of my budget for this project, but I might spring for the CalDigit.

Thanks for the suggestion.

I was under the impression that the CalDigit card was a proprietary buss interface using mini-sas only as a connector. Please post back if that combo works.

The Caldigit uses the external PCIe interface.



www.strypesinpost.com

strypes Wrote:
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> The Caldigit uses the external PCIe interface.

The CalDigit card is listed as having 3 - external mini SAS connectors. It isn't on the OWC recommended cards list for the drive enclosure though. I'll call them, most likely Monday and post answer. Probably a proprietary card as VPiccin says.

I believe that Caldigit has two different interface systems that use the same connectors and cables. In one case their RAID card uses mini-sas in a similar, if not the same way as the OWC solution.

They also have products, like the HD Pro line, that have internal RAID intelligence that use similar looking connections to a buss expander in the MacPro.

I know that their RAID card is well regarded, and if it is comparable with the OWC chassis might be an interesting play. I have speced and installed the HDPro stuff, and it has preformed flawlessly. If your budget allows that would be a good choice.

I also like OWC customer support, and buying your frame, drives and RAID card from a single vendor has some real advantages should you have issues.

-Vance

My bad. I thought you were talking about the HDOne. That would use an external PCIe connection. The raid card uses mini SAS, according to their site.



www.strypesinpost.com

I talked to an OWC salesperson and he confirmed with one of their "development guys" that the CalDigit raid card will work with their "mini-SAS Rack Pro" enclosure. They still say Raid 5 isn't great for a "sustained data rate with video due to parity checking," but that it should work much better than on their esata enclosures. This info is strictly their word since I haven't actually tried it myself. Still not sure what I'm going to purchase, but it looks like an affordable, fast solution.

If RAID 5 isn't good for video then how come we've been running RAID 5 for something like four or five years now in our shop without problems? In fact it's saved us at least two times.

I have not used either product you're looking at. We run Small Tree and Maxx Digital RAIDs here primarily and have one WiebeTech RAID unit.

Recommend all three.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Wait a minute...you are saying CalDigit told you RAID 5 is not great for "sustained data rate with video due to parity checking"? Bullsh!t. I ran a RAID 5 tower on my last job for 5 years (Uncompressed SD / 1080 Prores HQ)...and, like Walter, it saved my a$$ more than once.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

What Walter said. A RAID 5 is striped with distributed parity, so the speed isn't bad. A RAID 0 has better performance, but offers no data protection, so if a drive fails or runs into a bad block, you are toast. Not many in post production run a 5 drive array on a RAID 0 configuration. It takes a brave soul to use a RAID 0 in a day to day post operations without redundancy.



www.strypesinpost.com

> It takes a brave soul to use a RAID 0 in a day to day post operations
> without redundancy.

I'm running a RAID0 pair at home, and one place I work for used a RAID0 for a long time. But yeah, you better have rock-solid backups if you use them. RAID0 actually has a higher chance of failure than running the two drives separately, because even if one of the two drives flunks out, both sides are useless. So your risk is doubled (even more if you're running a RAID0 with more than two drives).

If you're using timecoded tapes and batch-recapturable media, though, RAID0 can be worth it for the speed. Just don't rely on it if you generate new, non-expendable media all the time. But in a scenario like a long-form project, where all the media comes in at the beginning and you can perform a wholesale backup just once, RAID redundancy can be less of a necessity.

I haven't found RAID5 to have any speed problems, either.


www.derekmok.com

It's a 2 drive array. You can't do raid 5 on that. If you have 3 drives or more in an array, you'll probably consider a RAID 5.



www.strypesinpost.com

I thought he was talking about the OWC unit (Qx2)? That one has up to five drive slots, though I'm running it only with two slots filled.


www.derekmok.com

Historically, RAID 5 wasn't the best choice for video because RAID 3 gave you better sequential read performance, which of course is very nearly all we do.

But it's been ages since I heard anybody talk about the distinction. I'm not even sure RAID 3 exists any more in any practical form.

I have used 1 RAID 3 array a couple of years ago, so it may take awhile before we put it on the list of extinct species.



www.strypesinpost.com

With the speed of drives and arrays, I would guess the need for RAID 3s aren't as great as they were years ago.



www.strypesinpost.com

That, combined with the prevalence of compressed editing formats like DNxHD and such.

It was a big deal back in the day when the largest hard drive you could buy was nine gigabytes, and you needed thirty-two of them to do uncompressed SD.

grafixjoe Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Wait a minute...you are saying CalDigit told you
> RAID 5 is not great for "sustained data rate with
> video due to parity checking"? Bullsh!t. I ran a
> RAID 5 tower on my last job for 5 years
> (Uncompressed SD / 1080 Prores HQ)...and, like
> Walter, it saved my a$$ more than once.

No. I'm not saying that, read the post. A salesperson at Other World Computing told me "Raid 5 isn't great for a "sustained data rate with video due to parity checking.'" I've used Raid 5 systems for video, but never owned one, so you've won't get an argument from me. :-)

I questioned the person I talked to for several minutes and I got the feeling they've had complaints about their Qx2 enclosure dropping frames (which only takes 4 drives, not 5, Derek). I don't think he knew that much about it and put me on hold a number of times to talk to someone on their development team.

Just reporting what I heard from OWC.

Also, take a look at post #5 in this thread from VPiccin for more on the OWC Qx2.

Sorry...OWC. Doesn't matter who said it...still wrong.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.