Storage Advice?

[Christopher Barrett]

Ok... it's time for me to get serious about storage. Unfortunately, this means I have to add an expansion chassis as Resolve has eaten up all my PCI slots.


Questions:

Cyclone or Cubix?
Promise, Maxx Digital or other?
SAS or eSATA and what card for that? I also need an eSATA card anyway for Red Station

I'd like to have 12 to 16 TB of drives in Redundant setup.... Raid 5?

advice much appreciated...

CB

 

[D Fuller]

Jeff Kilgroe, where are you?

I'm looking at these questions too, and my research suggests:

Cubix

SAS - Atto H680 or R680, depending on where you want your raid control to live, card or box. (Your Red Station comment suggests the H680.)

I'm still looking for an enclosure myself, so I'm interested in what other people have to say about that.

Oh, and you might want to add SAS LTO backup.

 

[Tom.Wong]

my advice.

go for cyclone 2707

get both the h680 and r680.

h680 with esata fan out, you can support up to 8 esata devices, red stations and other drives. if red station is all you need, it's still worth the money, at a little over 300 bux and a high end 4 port esata card at 200, it's worth the extra money, best esata setup I've ever used.

r680 will hook into sas. look into the istoragepro's. they are really fast but much cheaper than the maxxdigitals and offer up the same performance. I'd also go raid 6 if you are doing 8 bay, with a hot spare. you'll end up with near identical speeds as the raid 5, but with a extra drive for security. the 6g istoragepro's are looking really good.

i also hear really good things about the stardom's too, but the istoragepro will let you expand out with multiple units and chain them together.

combine all that into a compact rackmount to fit all that and you are looking at a really fast and tight setup.

 

[Christopher Barrett]

Thanks Tom!

Cyclone 2707, h680 (+ esta fanout), r680, and istorage pro Tower 8 Bay 6G SAS Expander are on the way. I think I should be good to go. Drag is, when I dump the Drobo, the new RAID will be almost full... ugh.

 

[Tom.Wong]

the nice thing about the 6g istoragepro's are that you can expand more out when you need more space, and start chaining them together. make sure to upgrade all the firmware on the cards when you get them in too. you should get pretty good results at raid 6

 

[Christopher Barrett]

Installed the H680 with fanout cable. RedMags pop up nice and quick, but my external Raid Boxes don't show. They show up fine on the Sonnet E4P. Is this probably a Port Multiplier or Raid issue?

 

[Tom.Wong]

Installed the H680 with fanout cable. RedMags pop up nice and quick, but my external Raid Boxes don't show. They show up fine on the Sonnet E4P. Is this probably a Port Multiplier or Raid issue?

make sure the firmware on the h680 is at the latest.

and before you plug in the esata on those external raids. power it up all the way first. make sure the drives are spun up all the way. than plug in the esata. I had the same issue with my qx2's and letting it spin up all the way first than plugging in the esata got it working. for some reason leaving the esata plugged in while the drive spins up makes it not recognize.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

If I was building out a serious RAID I would be going CalDigit just because their SAN options with the cards are so much more affordable than 10GigE Fiber.

 

[Christopher Barrett]

Also, once the Chassis is up and running, will additional Quadro 4000s make much of an improvement in Resolve (since they'll be sharing the single 16x channel)?