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GROUP PURCHASE - 3ware Sidecar RAID Solution

Thor Wixom

Thor Wixom

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Reduser.net Group Buy for 3ware Sidecar:

At NAB 2008, I had the privilege of doing post production demos on the 3ware Sidecar.

In a nutshell, the 3ware Sidecar uses an x-SATA connection (which utilizes 4 independent SATA channels) to achieve sustained rates of 250 MB/sec in RAID 5, and 300 MB/sec in RAID 0… in other words, plenty of bandwidth and throughput for post production of Red footage. It is also compatible with both Mac and PC (although it's not bootable on the Mac side).

The beauty of the Sidecar is that you put your own hard drives in, making it a very cost effective solution…. well under $2000 for the Sidecar and four 1 TB drives!

The 3ware team were very impressed by the interest that Red owners and reservation holders were showing in the Sidecar, so I suggested that they do a group buy on Reduser.net. They agreed and asked me to organize it.

The MSRP of the Sidecar kit is $895. It is currently listed at the NAB show price of $695. However, 3ware has agreed to a Reduser group buy price of $595!

The kit includes everything you need... the enclosure, the cabling, the controller card, and the software to manage your RAID. Just add your own hard drives and build your array!

There are no minimums. Simply go to the following Sidecar link and click “Add to Cart”:

http://store.3ware.com/?category=9&subcategory=9&productid=9650SE-SIDECAR-KIT

When you get to the checkout page, enter my name, thorwixom (no caps, one word) as the promotional code.

If you want to see the 3ware Sidecar in action… go to FreshDV and click the 3ware link in the “Featured Videos” section:

www.FreshDV.com (Thanks to FreshDV for shooting, editing and posting this video!)

You can also see more info about the Sidecar (including minimum specs) at 3ware’s website:

http://3ware.com/products/Ext_serial_ata2-9000.asp

Thanks also to Jeff Kilgroe and Jason Ramsey for their assistance in making this group buy possible.

If any of you have any technical questions before you make your purchase, feel free to contact David Graas at 3ware. His email is dgraas@amcc.com.

Cheers!

-Thor Wixom
Invictus Productions

Here is a photo of the Sidecar with the controller card:
 
2 questions:
Could you use two if these and raid them together so you get above the 320 MB/sec level with RAID 5

Carts. What's the price? (you'll need some of those as you swap drives...)
 
problem for us is the fact it's not GIGABIT...we are all on a gigabit LAN for the edit bays at our studio....otherwise this thing looks awesome
 
gunleik said:
2 questions:
Could you use two if these and raid them together so you get above the 320 MB/sec level with RAID 5

Carts. What's the price? (you'll need some of those as you swap drives...)
Click to expand...

Gunleik,

I am planning to put two RAID 5 Sidecars into a software RAID 0. I haven't done it yet, but I spoke with one of the 3ware support guys before NAB, and he said this is a common configuration, and that it is even encouraged by 3ware. In fact, they are prepping a tech sheet on this very thing.

One thing to keep in mind is that you need an available PCIe slot for each Sidecar, so you have to have 2 free slots to do this configuration.

I have asked one of the 3ware employees to get a Reduser account so he can reply in more detail.

-Thor
 
It is also compatible with both Mac and PC (although it's not bootable on the Mac side).
Click to expand...

Hi Thor

Enjoyed your demo at NAB and have budgeted for the sidecar.


It great that 1 TB drives are now supported.

Just to be clear, explain the above quote. I assume you mean it won't work as a system drive on the Mac side.

Thanks for your help on this.

Frank
 
Hi everyone, just joined so I could assist with questions on our product. As Thor mentioned, we have demonstrated the dual Sidecar configuration at MacWorld and it produced around 365MB per second sustained with a RAID 0 stripe from the operating system to combine the two RAID 5 arrays. Pricing for your group buy is $595 which is a great discount off the $895 MSRP. You can use any SATA drives you want with this kit so total price is dependent on what deal you get on the drives! ;)
 
Videodisc said:
Hi Thor

Enjoyed your demo at NAB and had budgeted for the sidecar.


It great that 1 TB drives are now supported?

Just to be clear, explain the above quote. I assume you mean it won't work as a system drive on the Mac side.

Thanks for your help on this.

Frank
Click to expand...

Frank, that is correct. For the Windows and Linux side we do support bootable arrays but for the Mac it would be secondary storage. This is usually a benefit however as it keeps the operating system and applications from effecting the data storage throughput on the array.

Here is the list for compatible drives we have tested with...

http://www.3ware.com/products/pdf/Drive_compatibility_list_3ware_SideCar_9650SE-based.pdf
 
Great !!

I was looking for a 4T external eSata hard drive, just for back-up (I have 2 T Raid software inside the Mac), but even simple hard drive boxes are more expensive than this product that seems to be very serious.
I have just bought one, and i will let you know my feeling when it will be there.
 
How long does this group buy last? Hopefully awhile.

There are plenty of RedUsers who will gradually pick this up on their radar in the coming months and year. It seems that after the initial ephoria and obsession with the camera itself, each RedUser's head comes down from out of the clouds and they think...

"Where the *$#@ am I going to store all of it!" :)
 
obin said:
problem for us is the fact it's not GIGABIT...we are all on a gigabit LAN for the edit bays at our studio....otherwise this thing looks awesome
Click to expand...

Other then the fact that your studio is on gigabit, any other downside for the other Redusers that it's not gigabit?
 
Just so everyone understands the difference... our Sidecar is considered a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) type of device rather than a NAS (Network Attached Storage). The benefit is that by having a direct connection from the controller to the drives allows much higher sustained throughput that is consistent which is ideal for video editing and large file transfers. The Sidecar does not have the convenience of just plugging it into a network like a NAS but the benefits make it a more worthwhile solution for video environments. In a NAS, you have the limitation of network bandwidth which typically limits potential throughput of up to 100MB per second at most. In reality, most NAS appliances do not even see that amount of performance due to network overhead and this does not even take into account if you have a shared network with multiple clients that can make it hard to maintain a consistent performance level.

There are people who use the Sidecar in a portable fashion and we just released the 9650SE-4LPME controller as an additional accessory to support this configuration. The way this works is that each desktop or workstation would have a 9650SE-4LPME controller installed into it and because of our hardware based RAID the array configuration data is contained on the drives themselves. This means you can take a Sidecar enclosure from one system to another and have the array come up as originally configured. :biggrin:

One more thing, the flexability of RAID for data protection and performance can be used in many environments beyond video editing. The Sidecar is recommended for home systems and workstations because that is an area were data protection can be lacking. Hard drives are much like car tires, they are considered a wear item and the more you use them the more likely of potential failure. With a hard drive, its not a matter of if it will fail but when! (Which is why I use a four drive RAID 5 on my own home system to keep my I-tunes and digital photos protected!) :wink:

David
 
obin said:
problem for us is the fact it's not GIGABIT...we are all on a gigabit LAN for the edit bays at our studio....otherwise this thing looks awesome
Click to expand...

Guess what? That doesn't make sense... Gigabit will never have read/write this fast. So you wont find something like this with Gigabit... its counter-productive. Thats like asking for a USB port. You can have this box connected to a computer on the network and get the same speeds as if it had a gigabit port on the back, except one computer takes advantage of the speed.

Gigabit = 1000 mbit/s
SATA = 3000 mbit/s
Fibre = 4000+ mbit/s


How fast have transfers been recorded over the SATA-X connection? Are they more significant than a single eSATA solution?

How easily can you switch to JBOD? Is there an external switch or a jumper inside?

I
 
Guess what back! I edit tv shows commercial spots and lots of
other work all in hd over the gigabit network. Works just fine.
we don't need 300+ mb/ sec for most tasks





UOTE=x86box;210571]Guess what? That doesn't make sense... Gigabit will never have read/write this fast. So you wont find something like this with Gigabit... its counter-productive. Thats like asking for a USB port. You can have this box connected to a computer on the network and get the same speeds as if it had a gigabit port on the back, except one computer takes advantage of the speed.

Gigabit = 1000 mbit/s
SATA = 3000 mbit/s
Fibre = 4000+ mbit/s


How fast have transfers been recorded over the SATA-X connection? Are they more significant than a single eSATA solution?

How easily can you switch to JBOD? Is there an external switch or a jumper inside?

I[/QUOTE]
 
For your needs you might not need to Print uncompressed 1080 to HDCAM SR, but for almost all of our deliveries it is mandatory. I am interested because I use two SATA 5 Bay RAID 5's Striped together to Print 1080 uncompressed. This is claiming to get the same speeds from 4 Drives... That is why I'm curious, I could use 6 less drives.

Gigabit is fine for Editing Offline in Pro Res or DVCProHD, and DV, I have one computer hold the drives and they all can access the media and it all works great. Gigabit is not expensive and its been a standard for almost 2-3 years, One can get 2 computers networked for $50,

If your not finishing in Uncompressed then you dont need this, If you need this to have a gigabit port then buy a small PC that holds a bunch of Drives and put it on the Gigabit LAN instead, you could even RAID the drives inside.

So there are absolutely no downsides that this doesnt have gigabit, it claims to be twice as fast as other solutions... it would actually be a downside if it did have gigabit... Because the computer its connected to already has gigabit... So what does it need it for?
 
x86box said:
How fast have transfers been recorded over the SATA-X connection? Are they more significant than a single eSATA solution?

How easily can you switch to JBOD? Is there an external switch or a jumper inside?
Click to expand...

I will let David also chime in on this, but at NAB, we were using the AJA speed test program on a G5 and it was consistently returning 300+ MB/sec sustained rates for both read and write from a 2k test file.

JBOD is actually considered "Single Drive Mode" on the Sidecar. The difference is that each drive maintains it's own full bandwidth SATA connection, instead of sharing the SATA channel between all the drives. It functions similarly to JBOD on a practical level, but it's faster.

I haven't done the Single Drive Mode myself, but David and I discussed it at NAB. He said it's as easy as loading the drives and using the 3ware software to build the Single Drive array. I'll let him continue that thought, though, since he's the expert. :whistling:

-Thor Wixom
Invictus Productions
 
So as drives get bigger and cheaper, I could eventually have just one sidekick and buy four 2TB drives (each for $50... lol) and it would work?
 
Any stats on the sustained rate when it is 80% full? A mostly empty RAID is always deceptively fast. It's a great price though... I think we'll try to pick a couple up.
 
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