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Best 5 Bay RAID Enclosure for Editing RED on Windows / Mac

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N.D. Paolo

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I just ordered 5 Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200 drives and am looking for the best 5 Bay RAID Enclosure Setup for Editing RED on Windows / Mac ...
I am interested in ESATA, USB 3 or Thunderbolt enclosures.
Does anybody have an enclosure they've tested and had good results with for 4K editing?


The Drobo 5D with USB 3 and 2 Thunderbolt at $750 is the most expensive one I'd consider and looks pretty good with SSD cache option,
but I've not yet seen benchmarks that make me want to spend $750 for the enclosure alone...

Happy Black Friday and thanks for any advice...
 
pegasus gets r/w 600+mb/sec in raid 5 (in the 6 bay box)....nobody gets close....they have a secret special sauce....it just works....and btw: once you have the box, you can replace the drives, no problem (lacie for example does not like you to do that....but it works fine anyway....promise has no problem with it...they just don't sell it bare...)...
afaik the drobo is the only other choice and if you add up the drives with the box it comes to just about the same price and the pegasus has more capacity and is faster...
i am not aware of any other thunderbolt 4 or 6 bay arrays.....
 
I think Lacie, G-Tech, and Promise/Pegasus are it for Thunderbolt RAIDs at the moment. An editor I know said he found Thunderbolt to be a little flakey, and moved away from that back to Fiber-channel.
 
If you just want an enclosure to hold the drives, that's easy. SansDigital has some good ones for cheap and there's a bunch of others out there doing the same thing. You still have to connect that enclosure and the drives to something -- a RAID controller. For RAID controllers, there are several options, but I like ATTO, Areca and HighPoint the best for most common options. The ATTO R680 is about $900 + $$$ for the enclosure + your drives and cable(s).

If you want a system with the RAID controller on the box, that starts to get pretty expensive, but it's a great option. Promise is excellent for their Thunderbolt units. Solid performance and great support. If you want SAS or SATA connectivity, there are other options like LaCie, Dulc', MAXX Digital, etc.. For the most part, none of them sell the units without drives. I have yet to find a decent RAID-ON-CHASSIS system out there that can be bought without drives. OWC has one that's passable for 4 drives, but it's slow with only a single eSATA connection.

By ordering 5 drives as you have, you're putting the cart before the horse somewhat. Drobo is an OK option and works in this situation, but their performance leaves a lot to be desired.

I would figure out which interface you want to use. Be it SAS, SATA, Thunderbolt... USB3 is probably out as it's pretty slow for "performance" storage or connecting RAID systems.
 
Great feedback- thanks guys.
So far, I have:

CHEAP: Gigabyte System Motherboard using FREE using Intel Southbridge at $0; CONS: internal only, performs as expected using Software RAID

---> SEARCHING FOR "CHEAP" external 5 bay "portable" RAID 5 solution with decent performance <--

Drobo 5D at $750; PROS: USB 3 / THUNDERBOLT and SSD cache option... CONS: benchmarks not encouraging.

EXPENSIVE OPTION: Pegasus R4 at $1050 with minimum drives, THUNDERBOLT... CONS: only Thunderbolt, need converter to get USB 3 or ESATA


I guess I should edit the title to include best performing "CHEAP" enclosure from a reputable company (I know, it's a stretch).
I have USB 3 and Esata on my Gigabyte X58A-UD3R Rev 2.0 motherboard and Esta on laptop currently, and was trying to come up with a 5-bay Enclosure with built-in RAID controller
for Drobo 5D $750 price or less. I'd buy the Drobo 5D as I love the specs, but haven't seen benchmarks showing this unit
cranking out over 300MB/s which it easily should with that many drives on hardware raid...

My 2 drive internal software RAID 0 benches in the 200+MB/sec range already using Hitachi drives already,
so I see no point going to a poorer performing external RAID 5 solution.

A simple solution would be buying a Pegasus R4 at $1055 and replacing the drives with the 3TB ones, but the price gets up there and
I don't have thunderbolt on-board, though I could use a converter or add an add-on card or replace my system board with the new dual-TB Gigabyte brand one,
which gets pricey...

The LaCie 5 bay above I believe is suitable for NAS and a great price, but too slow for performance use.
The G-Tech ES Pro looks decent from their benchmarks, but a little aged.


I've seen these, but have minimal desire to take a risk on cheaper vendor long-term:
http://www.sharkoon.com/?q=en/node/1809

http://www.sansdigital.com/towerraid-plus/tr5utbp.html

Unfortunately, everyone is closed today on BlackFriday so I have no luck reaching Synology, Sans Digital, G-tech, Drobo etc.
I figure, they should have test results with SSD drives installed, so I can figure the theoretical max speed of the raid controller in the enclosure
over USB 3 or ESATA

Maybe some new enclosures with updated controllers will release at CES 2013 with better RAID performance over USB 3 or Esata ...
 
Last edited:
Jeff Kilgroe said:
... The ATTO R680 is about $900 + $$$ for the enclosure + your drives and cable(s). ....
Click to expand...

I guess I got lucky: Not a 5 bay system, but a 4 bay system: Two (2) 4 TB G-Tech Es Pros @ $450.00 each + an ATTO R680 for about $800 .... $1,700.00 for 8 TB. Not the biggest, badest or the fastest ... but it kicks ass for me.

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I've used Enclosures built up by the guys at MacGurus out of Seattle....usually a bit more in $$, but service is EXCELLENT and they actually know what they are talking about--Rick is the guy there and he'll walk you through what works.....T-bolt or Esata...i have three 5 bay esata hot swappable bays from them with port multipiers...
http://macgurus.com/
 
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