Hard drives (storage and editing)

[Brian Iannone]

+1 on Sans Digital's enclosures. Although, if you're looking for something with transfer speeds of at least 600 MB/s, I'd recommend one of their SAS solutions. The TowerRAID TR8X+P is an eight-drive enclosure with mini-SAS connectivity. According to Sans Digital, you should see average speeds of around 700 MB/s in RAID 0.

The issue with eSATA is that no matter how many drives are in the array, you'll still be limited by the 265 MB/s maximum transfer rate of the actual eSATA interface.

[Harrison Diamond]

For what it's worth, if you do have Thunderbolt I have had a Promise Pegasus R6 since about a month after its introduction and it's been truly fantastic. Configured with a 6-drive RAID 5 it could pull speeds in excess of 700-800+ MB/Sec sustained read/write using AJA and BlackMagic's disk speed test utilities. Doesn't draw a lot of power, daisy-chain compatible, and really makes it possible to use an iMac or Macbook Pro as a major production tool. I've started to upgrade it with 4TB Hitachi 7K4000 drives (Promise uses Hitachi 7K1000 and 7K3000 drives in the stock configs, the 7K3000 3TB and 7k4000 4TB work great so far) as I can get hold of them, and with 6 bays that means I could end up with a 20TB RAID 5 or 16TB RAID 6 and still have blazing speeds plus enormous storage capacity. Of course it's not much use if you don't have Thunderbolt.

[Benedict Heinzl]

These Solutions are recomended by BMD for use with Resolve and seem to very good.
There are different price ranges but for example for a 8TB configuration:

http://www.caldigit.com/HDOne/ ~4000$ ~450MB/s
http://www.caldigit.com/HDPro2/ ~6000$ ~800MB/s

[Alexander Mejia]

+1 on Sans Digital's enclosures. Although, if you're looking for something with transfer speeds of at least 600 MB/s, I'd recommend one of their SAS solutions. The TowerRAID TR8X+P is an eight-drive enclosure with mini-SAS connectivity. According to Sans Digital, you should see average speeds of around 700 MB/s in RAID 0.

The issue with eSATA is that no matter how many drives are in the array, you'll still be limited by the 265 MB/s maximum transfer rate of the actual eSATA interface.

We have something similar like this at work, and on SAS 3.0gb/s we get around 500 Megabytes per second in Raid 5 over 8 drives. Keep in mind those mini sas connectors have 8 lanes of SAS. So that's a really cost effective raid if you have a tower with open PCI slots.

The Thunderbolt stuff looks interesting for people on laptops. Just depends on how mobile you want this thing to be.

[Ryan Lalonde]

For what it's worth, if you do have Thunderbolt I have had a Promise Pegasus R6 since about a month after its introduction and it's been truly fantastic. Configured with a 6-drive RAID 5 it could pull speeds in excess of 700-800+ MB/Sec sustained read/write using AJA and BlackMagic's disk speed test utilities. Doesn't draw a lot of power, daisy-chain compatible, and really makes it possible to use an iMac or Macbook Pro as a major production tool. I've started to upgrade it with 4TB Hitachi 7K4000 drives (Promise uses Hitachi 7K1000 and 7K3000 drives in the stock configs, the 7K3000 3TB and 7k4000 4TB work great so far) as I can get hold of them, and with 6 bays that means I could end up with a 20TB RAID 5 or 16TB RAID 6 and still have blazing speeds plus enormous storage capacity. Of course it's not much use if you don't have Thunderbolt.

thanks everyone and Harrison.

I think I'm going to go with the Pegasus R6 but not in a huge rush so I'm still going to look around.

[Brian Iannone]

We have something similar like this at work, and on SAS 3.0gb/s we get around 500 Megabytes per second in Raid 5 over 8 drives. Keep in mind those mini sas connectors have 8 lanes of SAS. So that's a really cost effective raid if you have a tower with open PCI slots.

The Thunderbolt stuff looks interesting for people on laptops. Just depends on how mobile you want this thing to be.

True. (Though by the way, I was referring to four-lane mini-SAS operating at 24 Gbps.)

I think I'm going to go with the Pegasus R6 but not in a huge rush so I'm still going to look around.

Also, keep in mind that if you go with a Thunderbolt solution, you'll be permanently stuck with Thunderbolt. Which, is not an issue, but very few Thunderbolt-compatible devices exist currently. Whereas, with a SATA-based or mini-SAS-connected system, any workstation with an eSATA/SAS PCIe card can access the data. Just something to consider. :)

[Scott Brown]

Simplest and cheapest solution is to get 4 fast hard drives (I favour Hitachi's) and stipe them raid 0 - this will deliver very high performance and the best bang for your buck. Caveat is you MUST backup all media religiously and remember if you don't have three copies, you don't have anything :o)

Of course if you have the budget, get a pro system provided by a Raid specialist.

Scott

[Sergio Perez]

I'm also searching for a HDD backup solution. I would love to go Thunderbolt but with no new Mac Pro on the market and me personally still figuring out if I will stay on the Mac Platform, I just keep purchasing Lacie quadra drives and connect them through e-sata. Eventually I will need a Raid 5 configuration but this has been working for me. People do seem to get unlucky with Lacie but I have had a very pleasant experience with them so far. 30 external D2 and Quadra drives for the last 7 years and only one single drive- which was formatted by an idiot and used on a PC and reformatted for Mac- failure. Cannot recommend more. Hope the new Seagate deal will not bring QC down the drain...

[Victor MOREIRA]

How about the eS PRO in RAID0?

http://www.g-technology.eu/products/g-speed-es-pro.php

I have 2 tours of 12TB with atto cards, striped in RAID 0, for a 24Tb total. I'm getting 1100Mb/sec on R/W.
Pretty impressive.