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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Which RAID?

Simon Dunne said:
The question is not what raid do you need, but what do you want to do with your storage? 8K @ 5:1 x the number of streams. That'll give you the figure to aim for, then double it! Don't get too hung-up on SSD vs HDD, the bottle neck is your connection between the raid and the disks. Take my TB2 Raid 6 speeds for example....

Click to expand...

That seems pretty damn fast. What you working with?
 
Has anyone thought of Raid 10? I believe this combines stripping with mirroring. So if you have 6 drives your data is split and written to 3 drives (3 times the write speed of one drive) but then each of those drives is also mirrored on another drive (so you have a backup). Seems a good option to me.

Also I enquired to G -Tech re their plans on TB3, and the answer I got was they will be announcing their new products in the New Year. http://www.g-technology.com/blog/thunderbolt-3-part-2-how-much-speed-do-you-need

I have two Promise r2+ units that I use and they have been great. Used them for a stills shoot. Import station, and edit station.
 
'Has anyone thought of Raid 10? '

RAID10 has its uses, but it is inefficient in terms of speed and capacity. For comparison, with the same 6drives in RAID5 the speed is theoretically 5x and so is capacity.
You need to realize this is media storage and no one is using mirroring for such a scenario.

BG
www.finale.tv
 
Bob G said:
'Has anyone thought of Raid 10? '

RAID10 has its uses, but it is inefficient in terms of speed and capacity. For comparison, with the same 6drives in RAID5 the speed is theoretically 5x and so is capacity.
You need to realize this is media storage and no one is using mirroring for such a scenario.

BG
www.finale.tv
Click to expand...

I'm not expert on this, but I have read up on the various RAID options, and what I found is that RAID 5 is greatly mistrusted amongst archive specialists who generally favor RAID 10 for workstations and 15/51 for serious archival (at which point tape is probably the better option).
 
I guess I am coming from experience looking for. a different option. I've used raid 5 on many different boxes over the years. A few years ago I bought a brand new box and 5 drives to work on a shoot. As I was copying off the finished job ( a stills shoot) to a client drive one drive failed in my raid array. It was a Drobo5d with 5 identical new drives just bought from B+H. Within an hour a second drive failed. Thankfully I had the array set for dual disk redundancy, so we still were ok, but it really freaked me out. I put it down to a bad batch of drives, all from the same batch.

It's fine if you have all this backed up somewhere else, but this happened before we could back up. Hence I like the idea of the mix of speed and duplication on a raid 10.
 
RAID 10 is really no more reliable than RAID 5. There are lots of different RAID configurations and ways to do things, none are really right or wrong, it just just depends on your situation and intended application. There is also RAID 50, which combines dual RAID 5 sets and stripes or interleaves the two sets together for additional speed and redundancy. There is RAID 15 (sometimes called 51) which is two RAID 5 sets mirrored for redundancy. Then there's RAID 6, 60, etc.. Larger RAIDs often have "hot spares" or drives that are installed, but unused and will kick in to replace a failed drive and rebuild your RAID automatically.

Speaking to your past experience with the failed drives, that does sound indicative of bad drives. You were also using a Drobo unit, which are notoriously bad anyway. And even more so in prior years.

Regardless of which RAID or primary large storage or performance storage solution you decide on, you should always have a good backup plan in place.
 
Christian Mushenko said:
I guess I am coming from experience looking for. a different option. I've used raid 5 on many different boxes over the years. A few years ago I bought a brand new box and 5 drives to work on a shoot. As I was copying off the finished job ( a stills shoot) to a client drive one drive failed in my raid array. It was a Drobo5d with 5 identical new drives just bought from B+H. Within an hour a second drive failed. Thankfully I had the array set for dual disk redundancy, so we still were ok, but it really freaked me out. I put it down to a bad batch of drives, all from the same batch.
Click to expand...
I agree with Jeff above. I think your problem is expecting good performance from the Drobo. There are tons of reliability complaints on those out there. I think they key is to use enterprise-class drives with better warranties, housed in a decent enclosure with lots of power and good ventilation. And use a utility to check the drive and monitor for any issues.

I'm using a G-Tech right now with eight drives in a RAID 5 configuration, and it's been fine so far. But these are all enterprise-class HGST drives. I think I'm hovering right around 900MBps or so, which is fine for 2K and 4K.

For long-term data backup, there are tons of white papers out there, and I think the reality is that nobody has figured out ironclad backup strategies for 20 or 30 years. The Motion Picture Academy has issued two reports on "The Digital Dilemma" basically saying, they don't know yet how to definitively preserve motion pictures other than film, which is known to last 50+ years. I have had backup tapes fail on two occasions, one about 7 years old and one about 4 years old, so those are not 100% either.
 
So in my predicament, I looked at this a billion different ways and now again asking for opinions.

I do not want to upgrade my PC for at least another year or two (leaning towards two). And looking at the options of external raid, I guess there is SATA which seems pretty fast 6Gbps.

Anyway, is it better for me to just buy and internal raid (Areca 1883i) and suck it up to not have portability. And if that’s the case, do y’all just have archive drives? I haven’t looked into LTO tapes, just big NASs for cheap.

Or is it better to get an external SATA and USB-3 raid chassis and edit from that.

I was think I could get one of the new external raids with TB3/USB-C and use a dongle for USB3.0 but I doubt I could edit off that. Again I’m looking to edit 8K footage and not have to transcode proxies if it’s possible.

Another question I have is how much faster is the internally raid? If it’s so much faster, I may just do that anyway.
 
David J. Buchanan said:
So in my predicament, I looked at this a billion different ways and now again asking for opinions.

I do not want to upgrade my PC for at least another year or two (leaning towards two). And looking at the options of external raid, I guess there is SATA which seems pretty fast 6Gbps.

Anyway, is it better for me to just buy and internal raid (Areca 1883i) and suck it up to not have portability. And if that’s the case, do y’all just have archive drives? I haven’t looked into LTO tapes, just big NASs for cheap.

Or is it better to get an external SATA and USB-3 raid chassis and edit from that.

I was think I could get one of the new external raids with TB3/USB-C and use a dongle for USB3.0 but I doubt I could edit off that. Again I’m looking to edit 8K footage and not have to transcode proxies if it’s possible.

Another question I have is how much faster is the internally raid? If it’s so much faster, I may just do that anyway.
Click to expand...

Very interested in these questions myself people who know stuff!
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
RAID 10 is really no more reliable than RAID 5.
Click to expand...

I guess it depends on what you mean by "reliable." What I meant by "reliable" is that the array will preserve your information and protect it from disk failure. With that definition, RAID 5 is inferior to RAID 10--the difference in reliability increasing as the size of your array increases.

RAID 5, in any configuration, only tolerates the failure of ONE drive at a time. For an array of 3 or 4 drives, those are still pretty good odds. As your array increases to 6 or 8 or 10 drives, you're more likely to have at least one of those drives fail. Once one drive fails you are left unprotected, and you just have to pray you can rebuild the data on the replacement drive without another one going out!

Because RAID 10 uses mirroring, in a large array, it's possible you could lose several drives and your data would not only still be there, but the whole array could potentially still operate while it rebuilds data on the fresh drives. Sure you could still have a freak failure where the two mirrored drives fail at the same time, but probability wise there is a big difference between "we're screwed if any more drives fail" and "we're screwed if this 1 drive out of 5 fails."

So yeah in terms of data protection, RAID 10 is more reliable, especially if you have more than 4 drives.
 
Raid 0/1/5/6/10. Doesn't matter. Your data should not be kept on disk for storage, just for edit. Shoot rushes, then ARCHIVE THEM. LTO still best at the minute i'd say. Then edit on your RAID. Your raid choice should take into account the speed you need, the redundancy you need and price. Price is always a factor. If you're happy with RAID 0, and can afford to have drives fail and then take the time to rebuild and reload your data from LTO, then that's a good option for some. Ideally, everyone should be running RAID 5 or 6 with a hot spare disk as a minimum. If you don't keep rushes after a project, then RAID 6 with a hot spare will give the most safety for the price IMO.
 
We are looking to purchase a Thunderbolt 2 RAID to work with our
Mac Pro/AJA IO/Movie Recorder capture system.

Right now we are able to capture 4 channels of HD ProRes.
In the near future, we may add additional channels of HD
OR we might want to capture TWO (2) Streams of 4K.

Capacity should be 24-48TB.
Enterprise quality drives are a good idea.

Recommendations are welcome. The max budget is like $4-5K.

Thanks in advance,

Jacques
 
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