I'm working on a project which involves a large amount of archival footage. The archive is constantly growing as the company finds and buys new (old !) material.
The system currently has two separate RAID 5's connected. The first is a Stardom SR4 (4 x 3TB drives = 12TB, effective capacity 9TB) connected via eSATA. The other is a Stardom ST8 (8 x 3TB drives = 24TB, effective capacity 18TB) connected by SAS.
Both are now approaching 80% of capacity and I need more storage.
The supplier I deal with has come up with a couple of options.
One is to replace the eSATA (2 ports) card with a USB 3 (4 ports) card. He suggests the advantage of the USB card is that it will allow for up to 4 x SR4's to be connected if needed. This is an attractive idea because it's likely that over time more storage will be needed (as new material becomes available), but I question how robust USB would be if there were multiple Raids connected. Anybody have any experience of this ?
The second suggestion is to replace the current Raid controller and add on another ST8 connected by SAS. I'm leaning towards this one.
Many thanks in advance for any suggestions or comments.
Mike
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