Inexpensive Raid suggestions?

[Michael Totten]

I couple months ago I had a 5 bay Kano desktop raid go down & I lost a bunch of media. It's an older esata box and Kano tech support tells me that they no longer make it and they only tested it to work with a maximum of five 750GB drives (which isn't enough space for me).

I'd like to replace my old raid with a newer rack-mountable raid that I can continue to upgrade / add drives to in the future. Something that would work well with FCP / Red software / Kona / Red Rocket...

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'd like to do it on the cheap if possible...

[Casey Schendel]

Ask Noah Kadner. He mention's some great one's in his book.

http://reduser.net/forum/member.php?u=385

[axel ebermann]

Doing Raid 'on the cheap' is an interesting form of playing Russian roulette :-)

That being said: With my limited means after all is being said and done I am running
a Raid 0 (fast) in a cooldrives enclosure.
I back it up on a second Raid 0 via Time Machine every day.

I used to run a Raid 5 until somebody blew a fuse while I was digitizing and I spend sleepless nights trying to recover my data. Raid 5 might be great when one and only one drive fails - but not in many other snafus computers might have in store.

Stay away from enclosures without trays. The spring loaded mechanism for the drives tend to fail.

[Greg Huson]

Maxxdigital is a sponsor of this forum and developing stuff for redusers regularly. Call/email them and they'll set you up. Better pricing than their competition, too.

[Michael Totten]

Doing Raid 'on the cheap' is an interesting form of playing Russian roulette :-)

That being said: With my limited means after all is being said and done I am running
a Raid 0 (fast) in a cooldrives enclosure.
I back it up on a second Raid 0 via Time Machine every day.

I used to run a Raid 5 until somebody blew a fuse while I was digitizing and I spend sleepless nights trying to recover my data. Raid 5 might be great when one and only one drive fails - but not in many other snafus computers might have in store.

Stay away from enclosures without trays. The spring loaded mechanism for the drives tend to fail.

Raid zero is what got me into this mess in the first place. I was told by the drive repair tech that raid zero is the most difficult configuration to retrieve data from... in my case all the footage was lost.

You're saying Raid 5 isn't all it's cracked up to be? What computer snafus are you referring too? Also, with a blown fuse, wouldn't a battery backup have prevented that?

[Michael Totten]

Maxxdigital is a sponsor of this forum and developing stuff for redusers regularly. Call/email them and they'll set you up. Better pricing than their competition, too.

Yeah I know maxx digital is good, but all their rack mount stuff is like 7-10K.
I'm not saying it's not worth it... I'm sure it is, I just can't justify the cost at this time.

I'm just trying to figure out if there is a less expensive alternative (an alternative that's not junk... if that even exists).

[Alan Skinner]

Just put a RAID 0 config together with a SANS DIGITAL TR5M box. eSata.

5 Drive trays, $199.00 USD.

I had 5 1 terabyte Seagates laying around. Works great.

Only limitation was my 32bit XP would only allow 2TB per volume. Need 64 bit OS to get full size of disks. I am getting 89 Megabytes of throughput. Supposed to be capable of 150 MB/sec with all drives running RAID 0.

I use this as a squirt box to backup my main Editing RAID. Keep in mind it is a cheap solution so may not be best for main editing volume.

Nice box, quiet fans. Works great for what I use it for and the price is right.

[Adil Lahoulou]

Just put a RAID 0 config together with a SANS DIGITAL TR5M box. eSata.

5 Drive trays, $199.00 USD.

I had 5 1 terabyte Seagates laying around. Works great.

Only limitation was my 32bit XP would only allow 2TB per volume. Need 64 bit OS to get full size of disks. I am getting 89 Megabytes of throughput. Supposed to be capable of 150 MB/sec with all drives running RAID 0.

I use this as a squirt box to backup my main Editing RAID. Keep in mind it is a cheap solution so may not be best for main editing volume.

Nice box, quiet fans. Works great for what I use it for and the price is right.

agreed. I've got 3 of those boxes on 2 different machines (mac and vista64). No failures yet. I use Raid0, Raid5, and passthru and seems ok.

[axel ebermann]

Raid zero is what got me into this mess in the first place. I was told by the drive repair tech that raid zero is the most difficult configuration to retrieve data from... in my case all the footage was lost.

You're saying Raid 5 isn't all it's cracked up to be? What computer snafus are you referring too? Also, with a blown fuse, wouldn't a battery backup have prevented that?

Michael,

I am basically running a fake Raid 1 (mirrored) by having a Raid 0 (High Speed) but backing it up on a second Raid 0 all the time.

The problem with the Raid 5 seems to be that if for whatever reason power is cut or something goes awry while writing on the drive you corrupt the file structure on the Raid and gone it is.

There will still be some file stuff left - but not all of it and retrieving it is a pain in the neck.

With a 1:1 backup/mirrored set your Raid goes down and you just continue with the second one.

With the cost of a TB at under 100 bucks it is not worth the hazzle to save on drives..

[Bob Gruen]

The real answer is an ATTO SAS Adapter, an HP Storageworks LTO4 tape drive, and Bru LE. There are several posts on this forum and other about what to buy and how to do it.

My Mac Pro has 4 internal 2GB drives set up as a RAID5 array with the Apple RAID card. (I wish I had the Caldigit which is a better card and externally expandable.) My next disk expansion will depend on the amount of cash I can work up, but if it's on the cheap I'll probably throw 10 2GB drives into a box and install an Ubuntu Server on it. I can do this safely because I have the tape drive...

A good tape drive is the answer to a surprising number of disk questions.

Bob