RAID setup

M

Mike@AF

Veteran
I am shooting an HD feature using the HVX200 in less than 2 months. I will need to get a large RAID setup for this. Here's what I'm looking at:

Granite Digital 8 Drive Hot-Swap LCD Case Kit $1156.00
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg56_satahot-swapbackup8.htm

Highpoint SATA II 8 Channel 2320 PCI-Express $289.99
http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg49_fasthostadapters.htm#highpointrocketraid

8 Seagate Barracuda 500GB HDD's $259.99 each
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDetail.jsp?ProductCode=101546

The whole setup would cost about $3880 after tax and shipping. How does that RAID look for the money?

I'm most concerned with performance, reliability, and the safety of the files, so I think I will be running RAID 5. Am I correct in thinking this will give me about 3.1-3.2 TB of usable disk space?
 
Looks very sweet. Here's my similar setup.

I've got 2 of these:
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2eEN4/

Very small, quiet and reliable. If you're sitting near to your RAID you'll need to be aware of the noise issues.

These are running off a RocketRAID 2320 with 8x250GB Barracudas.
I get about 420MB/s read, and about 350MB/s write speeds.

Make sure you get backup. I use these as hot-swap backup. Your main RAID may be RAID 5, but your data can still be lost - it's only disks.
http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2en2/

You can also use them hanging off a PCMCIA or Expresscard SATA card on a Powerbook or MacBook pro so it makes them very modular.

Consider a surge protector aswell to help ward off any power-spikes.

You'll also need one of these kits:
Internal to External PCI SATA Port Adapter from here:
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/SATACables.php
as the ports are all internal on the cards, and you need to get the cables out safely.
You'll also have to get a second set of SATA cables there to plug from the card to the drives. Be aware of the L shaped and straight SATA male/female connectors.

hope this helps
 
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What I don't like about the RocketRaid is that it requires a driver. Drivers can always give you headaches, particularly if Apple makes some kind of tweak to the OS which then requires HighPoint to tweak the driver for compatibility. My raid is based off a Sonnet card, which requires no driver and thus is truly plug and play. Just my .02 in the question. As far as quality, certainly no issues there with any of the products.

Ned Soltz
 
That brings up a very good point and makes this decision very difficult. The Sonnet card would be perfect if it supported more than RAID 0 and 1. I assume that's why the Highpoint card needs drivers.

Does anyone have any experiece with the Highpoint card and the reliability and stability of it? Are there a lot of issues when new OS updates come from Apple? How soon after an OS update does Highpoint release driver updates?
 
I don't find updates an issue. I update my OS quickly whenever I hear of an upgrade because I like it like that, and have always worked with betas etc.

I agree with the lack of drivers as I had 2 x Firmtek 4-port cards striped to a RAID0 before I had the RocketRAID. They worked just from system drivers too. But upgrading my box to a Quad G5 from a Dual 2Ghz required me to change from PCI-X to PCI-Express, and because of the nature of my work I had no choice and RocketRAID was the only real solution (despite fantastic FirmTek stablity with my previous solution).

I've found the Rocket RAID to be as reliable and hassle-free as the Firmtek cards with no drivers. Which is a credit to OSX.


mike.c
 
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