Developing 4 Bay RAID Box for RED users

[James Liu]

In RAID environment, we often relate to hot-swappable when you can replace the faulty drives while the system remains powered on. Basically, our RAID box has four functional drive slots. You have the option to insert a 3.5'' enterprise HDD, CF adaptor or Firewire adaptor in any of the four slots. For general purpose, you would have 1 slot dedicated to CF or firewire. You have to setup the RAID controller to treat the CF/Firewire adaptor as a single drive and that could be easily done through our browser-based interface. The rest of the 3 slots will have 1-2TB HDDs with a RAID 5 setup. So if you have three 2TB HDD under RAID5 configuration, you get total 4TB of storage and you can endure 1 drive failure at one time.
Everytime you have a failed drive, the data in RAID5 volume remains safe. You can just pull out the failed drive without powering off the system and replace a new HDD. After replacing the failed drive, you let the RAID to begin rebuild and everything is back to normal. :hurray:

I mentioned its customizable because you could have four slots dedicated to all CF reader or all HDD if you wanted to. The CF card or redrive are treated as normal drives and you can configure them just as you would under normal RAID environment.

 

[Tai Wah Lim]

Hi everyone,
Its been a while and I thought I'd give everyone an update. We are currently implementing the box to perform backup (CF/REDrive to RAID 5) without laptop/PC attached. The box will be an 3+1. Meaning that there are 3 slots of 3.5'' 1 or 2 TB drives for hardware RAID 5 setup and 1 slot for CF card or REDrive adaptor. All four slots will be hot-swappable so you can customize the box to fit more or less drives/adaptors. There will be a small LCD and few buttons on the box to display a simple GUI for simple backup commands and volume capacity information. A bit by bit comparison is used to ensure datas are being copied accurately.

At the same time, I'd like to throw a question to the crowd for survey purposes only. How much are you guys willing to pay for a box like this? We believe this tool will become popular among RED users and DITs but the R&D ramp up cost quickly. Obviously everybody prefer the least dollar paid but I am hoping we can get some honest figures so hopefully we can expect some kind of profit if this goes into production. LOL hmy:

James - 1 slot for CF Card OR REDrive adaptor? Why not both? Since you asked, price 50% below the cost of having a laptop and the attached drives of similar capacity and function will be attractive enough for me. Lim

 

[James Liu]

James - 1 slot for CF Card OR REDrive adaptor? Why not both? Since you asked, price 50% below the cost of having a laptop and the attached drives of similar capacity and function will be attractive enough for me. Lim

The main reason we don't combine CF with Firewire adaptor is because the technical aspects involved by the RAID controller. The RAID controller require an unique ID for each drive to manage RAID configuration so its not exactly a 'plug and play' mechanism you commonly have on a USB flash drive. However, its very easy to switch between CF to Firewire and most people would stick with one or the other.

I hope you meant a laptop + external hardware 4 bay RAID box when you are refering to cost. :yikes: A current laptop independent backup unit with single 500GB drive cost ~2k alone. Add a few more 2TB drives and a hardware RAID in there, its hard to cut cost but we will do our best..