The full RAID Saga can be found here:
http://www.bayareafilmmakers.com/?p=188
and here:
http://www.bayareafilmmakers.com/?p=196

I have finished my RAID and it’s wonderful. For starters, I moved up to a Mac Pro with PCI Express, so my old RAID card went with the old computer. My first AMS unit came with a PCIe RAID card so I plugged that in, and fired up the enclosure. It didn’t recognize the enclosure. I shouldn’t be surprised. This AMS unit has been nothing but a pain

So I went researching. The last time I spoke with Addonics, they suggested I look into something called, “Infiniband Multilane” so that’s where I started. The Infiniband connector takes the 4 internal SATA connections and converts them into a single cable to connect to another source. At the same time, I started seeing “SAS”, which stands for Serial over SCSI.

At first I was hesitant to look at anything SCSI, because I think SATA drives offer a much better solution that SCSI. SCSI, to me is like SONY saying no one needs 24P but those who buy our $100,000 cinealta cameras. (Sony obviously has changed their position and released some great cameras since they said that). I looked further into it, and found several RAID cards and enclosures that allow from 8 to 16 drives in a single enclosure.

The real beauty of the SAS and Multilane connector is that at the enclosure level, there is no combining of the signals, or the drives. This means, each drive is connected directly to the RAID card. Hence all of my problems with port replication are gone. But it comes down to how good your RAID card is.

I ended up going with a High Point Technologies RocketRAID 2322. This card has 2 Mini-SAS connector RAID CARD that supports RAID 0, RAID 1,RAID 5, RAID 10, RAID 50, and JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives). This allows me to connect up to 8 drives to this card and put them in a stripped array or an array with redundancy.

The plan, later on, is to get an 8 or 12 bay enclosure and set up a RAID 5, but for now, I’m going back to my Addonics 4 bay enclosure. I went to their web site and ordered the Multilane connector for external devices and swapped it out with the eSATA port replicator. This was the key. I fired it up, loaded the RAID utility software and set up my raid. It was up and running in no time. My Hardware Port Multiplier was broken, something that seems common in my experience.

In all, this new technology of SAS and multilane seems to be the holy grail of low budget RAID storage. The key, though will be making sure you are redundant, because with inexpensive drives, they are subject to failure. Raid 1 is best, but uses half of your storage for a mirror, and raid 5 is OK, but it only give you the benefit if only ONE drive fails. If two fail at once, you’re screwed. There is a variant of RAID 5 that uses 2 redundant drives rather than one. This is called different things by different vendors, so it’s something to really look into. Some call it RAID 6 if you’re looking.

I’m happy with my RAID. It’s fast, but I don’t know how fast. When I get my new Hardware capture card, I can test the speed of the RAID.

Thomas A. Koch