Mercury Elite Qx2

[Tom.Wong]

I've generally had good experiences with Mercury products, but I was wondering if anybody had any direct experience with their qx2 drives. I've been looking for a cost effective raid 5 solution with esata to cut down on costs, and I have a feature film coming up to edit and need some parity protection rather than my usual raid 0 and have multiple single disk backups. It's time for me to consolidate but I have a limited budget, about 2 grand, and need the aprox capacity/overhead of 8 tb. Please let me know if you have any personal experiences with this enclosure.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/

 

[Bruce Allen]

I'm running two on an iMac - both in 8TB RAID5 mode. Great except a bit slow - certainly slower than my 8-drive hardware RAID6. Not sure if it's an FW800 issue (I'm told the new iMacs' FW800 ports suck) but it feels like it's around 40MB/sec instead of 80... When I have time I'll check out whether it is alleviated by an eSATA connection or formatting the drive into smaller chunks.

That said, it is really great for my project. Also, packaging was really nice - the 4 drives come well protected by custom-cut foam and already mounted to their sleds. All you have to do is slide them in. Another benefit is no wall wart - it has a standard plug, the same used by computers.

So yes, if you don't need insane speed (or can do the eSATA thing), I say go for it.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Tom.Wong]

I am actually running esata now, so the performance should be several times over fw800. I'm glad that the build and the hardware raid is stable, I've been reading 50/50 reviews about the drive. It certainly is the cheapest raid 5 enclosure you are gonna get, and I'll be cutting narrative with VFX in AE, so I can deal with a little performance hit as long as the enclosures are stable. May I ask what internal HD's you are using?

 

[Bruce Allen]

I went with the stock ones (cheaper non-enterprise version). They are the cheap Hitachi 2TBs. Probably the best choice for the money as WD and Seagate seem to be purposely disabling RAID features on their non-enterprise drives but Hitachi hasn't gotten around to doing that yet.

I'm usually a DIY guy, but after the ease of setting up the first enclosure, I weighed up buying the 0TB one and getting 4 drives. In the end I decided that I didn't have the downtime to wait on RAID formatting, etc - plus I liked the extra warranty. So I just ordered another pre-configured 8TB one.

Oh, I should add: the fan ramps up a lot when it is first being set up but after that settles into a pretty quiet setup. I am kinda nuts about fan noise, so I still put them reasonably far away under my desk though.

BTW, two Qx2s are also smaller than my 8-drive ProAVIO RAID enclosure. It's nice to know that if for some reason I wake up and my apartment is burning down, I can easily dash out with those two guys under my arm, not weighing me down much

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Tom.Wong]

yeah i was gonna get just the enclosures. I need around 8 tb of space with a little overhead, so i'm gonna get 2 enclosures, 4 hitachi 2 tb's, and 4 samsung f3 1 tb's to save on cost. I'm the type that doesn't really mind fan noise, as long as the performance for the price is there.

 

[Steve MacMillan]

I've been running a 4TB version in RAID 5. It's been trouble free.

 

[Tom.Wong]

ESATA? how do u feel about the performance?

 

[Jason Samuel]

I'm in the same boat as both of you. I used this drive on the last feature I was on. We had some issues with the first enclosure they sent us, but after it was replaced, it was all good. I have the same feeling about the speed, it is kind of slow. The main reason we went with this drive was because of price and eSATA + Firewire 800. Our editor only had an iMac to use for the offline edit. So we ingested on the set via eSATA, transcoded and when we were all done, we handed off the drive for him to edit using FW800. We ordered it with the Seagate drives, which seem to be fine. On my other hardware RAID 5 @ my personal studio, I'm using those same non-enterprise Hitachi 2TB drives and they're working out great. FYI, Fry's 25th anniversary sale has them for $109 each right now (Until May 20th I think)... I might have to pick up a few more.

 

[Tom.Wong]

they are literally so cheap it is hard to pass up, i have low expectations from the fw 800 speed, as I already feel that it is an outdated connection. I try to work with esata as much as possible now, and I'll be moving to SAS and fiber in the future, but this is for a low budget feature so I have to think cost effective. Judging but these comments I think it's gonna be a good buy. The next step up for a raid 5 enclosure is literally twice as expensive...

 

[Dustin Cross]

What kind of speeds are people seeing with esata? I want to buy a few of these.


Dusty

 

[Tom.Wong]

Hey, just wanted to follow up on this post. Drives are in, got two of these suckers, using Samsung Spinpoint f3 1 tb drives. The drives them selves are pretty nice, on my 4 disk raid 5, i'm getting a full 3 TB of space, so the advertised capacity for the samsungs are very accurate. As for the qx2, really not much to complain about.
Threw in 4 unformatted drives, the build on the raid 5 was mere seconds, and initialized/formatted on my mac. The zero out I did took 14-16 hours, but afterwards ran some AJA disk speed tests. At raid five, read/write speeds matched each other very evenly. only average 198-203 mb/sec on ESATA
Not fast enough for some, but for the work I'm doing, gaining parity, capacity, and almost tripling the speed of your average 2 disk raid 0 is very nice. Great bang for the buck, one of the cheapest raid 5 solutions out there, and it's pretty compact and awesome.