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storage for pros

grantray

By grantray
in Digital Forum

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Guest sirvine

Guest sirvine

Posted
Posted

How is that better than 4x400GB RAID5 though (which is the same price or less and more usable capacity)? You'd have to have multiple drive failures for the RAID5 to be less reliable, which is more likely to happen to two drives than four anyway.

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bradhusick

bradhusick

Posted
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Guys,

All Macs can set up a software RAID1 between any internal or external drives. My solution is to use two "continuous duty" drives such as the WD RE series with 1 million hours MTBF. I use two internal to my G5 tower and two in a generic external enclosure. Since we're just storing photos, raw transfer speed isn't as important as it would be in a digital video application.

 

This is an extremely cost-effective way to go. For example, provantage.com sells the WD 250GB RE drive for $77 each. Seagate also sells the Seagate Barracuda ES enterprise hard drives in SATA with capacities up to 750GB, available at provantage for $166 for 500GB or $312 for 750GB. I don't work for provantage, but I have shopped with them successfully.

 

-Brad

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LichMD

LichMD

Posted
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This is an extremely cost-effective way to go. For example, provantage.com sells the WD 250GB RE drive for $77 each. Seagate also sells the Seagate Barracuda ES enterprise hard drives in SATA with capacities up to 750GB, available at provantage for $166 for 500GB or $312 for 750GB. I don't work for provantage, but I have shopped with them successfully.

 

-Brad

 

Brad,

that is cost effective, my only concern is that I had a brand new WD 250 Gb that I purchased (as one of a pair) failed midbackup. It's made me a little hesitant to use this solution.

In the 5 weeks I've been using the M8 I've shot a bit shy of 2000 photos, and with Eoin's hack I have at least 2 copies of each DNG.

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LJL

LJL

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Sol pointed to an earlier thread that did cover a lot of this ground. Basically, if you are going to use a software RAID configuration, get yourself SoftRAID rather than using Apple's OS X software RAID. If you move the RAID configuration to another computer, it will be broken with OS X, but not with SoftRAID. I have no affiliation with SoftRAID, and I do not use any software RAID configurations myself, as although they are cheaper than having a hardware RAID controller at work, they tend to be both slower and less reliable overall.

 

As for larger external storage configurations, the ReadyNAS XRAID or the their RAID 5 set-up is very reliable. If you place it on a gigabit network, it is also quite fast, and you can access it from other computers easily.

 

As for HDs....a good bet is to stick with things that are "enterprise" level or higher, as they are designed for much longer hard use than many of the cheaper consumer grade drives that are being sold now for TiVo-like set-ups. If a hard drive is going to fail, it usually will do so sooner than later, and it is a good idea to have a spare handy to swap out a failed drive. This is much more practical with RAID 5 configurations, but does also apply to other RAID configurations except striped. If a drive fails in a striped array, you lose everything, so plan some other mirror back-up for any striped array you might be using. Striped RAID is great for speed, but there is no redundancy. Be careful.

 

LJ

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4season

4season

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This seems like a cute and easy way to get a little extra protection against hard drive failure, but it won't help against "oops" like overwriting/deleting the wrong things! But perhaps combined with Mac OS X 10.5 with it's Time Machine application, that will be addressed too. One attraction of G-Safe is that it's doing the mirroring in hardware, rather than relying on special software. That ought to make it a little bit more "plug 'n play". I admire the latest quad Xeon Xserves and Xserve RAID, but those are hardly home or small office products.

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4season

4season

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As for HDs....a good bet is to stick with things that are "enterprise" level or higher, as they are designed for much longer hard use than many of the cheaper consumer grade drives that are being sold now for TiVo-like set-ups.

 

That's what I thought too, but this was an interesting alternative view:

 

Slashdot | Everything You Know About Disks Is Wrong

 

In any event, got to be careful about choosing products designed for the server room unless you've actually got a server room, because they can be LOUD and they probably presume a good climate-controlled environment. Mostly, they're designed to be serviced "hot", but for a single-user setup, that's probably overkill.

 

For the last PC I assembled for myself, I used a Samsung Spinpoint SATA drive and it's been a gem: Fluid bearing technology means very little noise, and it has no special cooling requirements.

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wparsonsgisnet

wparsonsgisnet

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I use LaCie external drives -- purchased as Refurb's because they only offer a 1-year warranty. I figure they should pay for the possible drive rehousing in another external case.

 

I keep three (3) copies of my diginegs and two (2) of my DVD's (as prepared by Vegas for burning disks; I have the original DV tape, as well). I use an inexpensive piece of sw called Second Copy for the "mirroring."

 

I examined storage arrays, but like the idea of *easily* interchangable usb and firewire drives. I can use them on the bride's MacBook as well as my windoze machine.

 

I am now buying 600 GB disks for less than $200. The LaCie's are fast and, if not totally reliable, then revivable. I haven't lost a file in more than a decade and this is a lot cheaper and more flexible than an array.

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Guest sirvine

Guest sirvine

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Once you take access speed more or less out of the equation, your options include things like software RAID and USB/Firewire mirrored drives.

 

Just remember that protection against hardware failures is one thing. Backups are something different.

 

In my experience, modern high capacity hard disks have terrible odds for survival. I have a closet shelf full of Western Digital, IBM, Seagate, etc., etc.--all essentially useless, except for desperation salvages. It's a matter of when, not if. For this reason, I prefer a 4+ drive RAID5/XRAID solution because I can just replace the drives as they go bad without having a single point of failure at any time. The idea of two drives crapping out before I can get the new mirror up and running is depressingly realistic. Just consider how much that would suck.

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wparsonsgisnet

wparsonsgisnet

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... For this reason, I prefer a 4+ drive RAID5/XRAID solution QUOTE]

 

Sol, would you describe your array, please.

 

I would be interested in the brand of the housing, the connection format (usb, firewire, or internal bus-card), operating system, and the interchangeability of the connection to another computer.

 

Obviously, Raid5 is a superior method of mirroring/disaster recovery, as opposed to simple mirroring. I'd like to assess the trade-off of cost against the ability to move the array to another computer as easily as ordinary, external drives.

 

Thanks.

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LJL

LJL

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Bill,

While Sol will chime in on his own, I thought to offer up a couple of options for you to consider also. Of the RAID 5 /XRAID, ReadyNAS (Infrant Technologies) may have the best bang for the buck. As I have mentioned in other threads, the best way to deploy, if you can, is on a gigabit network. That would be a separate sub-network to your standard network, an you would place all your faster machines on that network. A simple gigabit switch is all that is needed. If your PCs have gigabit capabilities, this is the way to go. (The MacBooks, MacBook Pros, G5s, Mac Pros and some iMacs and PowerBooks have gigabit built in already.) It might not be too expensive to drop a gigabit card into your PC, if you do not already have that speed.

 

For other exteranl boxes, I have been going with the dual enclosures from Other World Computing. They hold two SATA drives and can be hardware configured for striped RAID, with software for mirrored RAID, or just as sparate drives to use your own back-up configuration. The cases are available with FW800/400, USB2 and even SATA connections now, if you have an iternal card that can output SATA. I use them as FW800, and can move them from machine to machine as needed, or access them through the networked computers by sharing. The dual units cost about $120, but come with all the cables, cords and power brick. They also sell single drive cases for less. As you know, with FW, you can daisy chain them for a large array, if you need to.

 

Not pushing OWC or have any affiliation with them, but they do have some good deals on some very good and useful gear. Another option for FW800 RAID connection is available from WiebeTech. They have a nice unit that handles 4+drives and built in RAID controller and can be connected via FW800/400 or USB2. They may have added SATA to that configuration also. They are a bit more expensive, but the stuff is well designed and it works, from what colleagues tell me. Worth checking out.

 

LJ

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Guest sirvine

Guest sirvine

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Bill,

 

I have a ReadyNAS NV+ which is configured as XRAID (as far as I can tell, this is Infrant's unique implementation of RAID5 that has the added bonus of allowing me to replace drives on the fly with larger drives and have the entire array update itself without any interruption). I connect to a PowerMac G5 and my various laptops by gigabit ethernet, as LJ describes. A 1.6TB ReadyNas NV+ with 1GB onboard memory (which renders about 1.1TB usable disk space in XRAID mode) cost me around $1200 from NewEgg.

 

ReadyNAS is basically a monitorless mini-server wrapped in a sturdy (and quiet!) metal shell with features dedicated to storage and media sharing across many PCs, laptops and other network-enabled devices.

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