DIY Raid along with Fibre Channel network

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Do you mean not as good as Windows file sharing, or problems using it in a windows domain system?

Problems using it with windows in general. Samba shares would cut out, randomly change permissions and this was with us never touching it, the thing just ran 24/7 but it had a life of its own, it was a nightmare. We finally put it out if its misery and installed windows server 2003 and never had a problem after that. And it wasn't a question of expertise I had never even been on a windows 2003 box let alone configured one but in less than 2 hours over a weekend I had the whole shop switched over to a domain, it was foolproof and worth the $$$ for the reliability.

Later a few editors wanted to add 3 macs onto the network and they had millions of problems... so it's not perfect. But if you run windows and only windows it works perfectly.

 

[gtfx]

Folks,

I would assume that a constraint is also to be portable, and reliable while capturing from RedCamera, one would need a field usable device! How about a quarter rack, with self contained UPS, to allow for switching power source from mains to gen-set or solar etc.

A server (taking on from David's post) say SuperMicro or Chenbro with SATA-II or SAS drives, (3 RU 16 disks), triple 760 Watt power supply (2+1 redundancy), 4x4 port SATA or SAS raid cards, each Raid card with 2xRAID 1 pairs or 1x RAID10 set and a software Raid0 (MD) (OS could be Gentoo or similar booted through USB key, vm.Swappiness=0) across all the HW RAID sets. One would need PCI-E or PCI-X capable cards for all devices, and a server grade motherboard with 1024mhz bus, 2 64bit processors, about 6 GB RAM (to provide caching).

I estimate (based on my limited testing) this will provide non blocking write speed of ~1+GBPS. Which matches the 4k estimated data flow via a 10GBE connection.

Assuming one is using 750 GB SATA-II or 300 GB SAS disks, one would get approx 3 to 2 TB usable redundant, protected usable space in a field device.

One can stack about 4 such hosts in a quarter rack along with a UPS too! Could be house n a station wagon, etc. Will require air conditioning support, however, thats easy with some of the available rack options.

what say thee wise folks? again, above is purely from the perspective of capture (in field) only. an above will not break the bank.

Your comments, much appreciated.
best,
S.