Re: Looking for good Raid system.

LaCie Thunderbolt RAIDs are excellent. You will need at least the LaCie 5big Thunderbolt 2 to get kind of speed you require. This system costs a bit more than your estimated budget, but it has 5 drives and 10TB of storage capacity. Striped to RAID5 this will give you approximately 8TB of effective capacity with a maximum read/write speed of 1024MB/s. The real average read speed will be between 500 and 600 MB/s. This is certainly fast enough for 4 simultaneous full HD ProRes 422 streams (which requires 100 MB/s average read). The 2-drive Drobo does not ever get tat kind of speed

The Promise Pegasus3 4R is a bit slower as it only has 4 drives, but it certainly is fast enough for what you need. B&H are having a Black Friday sale for this system, now priced at $1099 instead of the usual $1,454 (see screenshot).

But you say you have a Drobo 5D? If so, I don't understand why this system would be too slow. If it has 5 good drives inside (NO SSD!!), it should be as fast as the LaCie system.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Ronny, I only have (2) 2Tb hybrid drives in it at this time. I'm holding out to get my two 3Tb drives back from Seagate that crashed to put in it. Will that make it work? I could put two of my internal 3Tb drives from my old MacPro in it until then. but they are pretty full.

I'm glad I waited on the Pegasus2. They were $1299 yesterday at B&H. I found the Lacie 5Big on Amazon for $1799. MIght go with that one since this is what I will be making money with for the rest of my life.

But, not a closed deal. Your thoughts?

Trig

Ronny, Lacie 5Big 10Tb for $999 and 20Tb for $1299. Does larger drives translate into slower speed?
Trig.

If you have a new MacPro you absolutely need a Thunderbolt 2 RAID, this will make a huge difference. The LaCie 5Big 10TB at $999 is Thunderbolt 1. The LaCie 5 Big Thunderbolt 2 starts at $1299 for 10 TB.

Larger drives do not translate into slower speed, quite the opposite. The more a drive gets full the slower it gets. The same applies to a RAID system, which is multiple drives striped as one single drive volume. The more the volume gets full the slower it will get. You start noticing speed loss as soon as your drives have less than 20% of their total capacity left.

The Drobo you have bought is just a chassis. In order to make it work as a RAID you need to put 5 exactly the same new quality 7,200 rpm drives in it, then let the Drobo stripe these drives to RAID5. Never put used or cheap low quality drives in a new RAID. This will significantly reduce the speed and the reliability of the RAID system. Always make sure to buy one extra spare drive that is exactly the same as the drives inside the RAID. If one of the drives in a RAID fail you will lose no data. Just replace the failed drive with the spare one (that's why the spare must be exactly the same) and let the system restore the RAID.

If you decide to buy a new Promise or LaCie RAID you always can use the Drobo as a JBOD (just a bunch of disks) chassis for storing your old drives, for backups etc... But unless you put 5 new and high-quality drives inside the Drobo and you stripe the drives to a RAID you will never get any decent speed out of it for multicam work.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Ronny, I am feeling better already, just reading your post.

I have psyched myself up to spend the $2,000 for the 5big one, but now, all I will need to do is buy four more drives like the ones B&H sold me with the Drobo. But, also after talking to the B&H guy, I added a Crucial memory card.

SEST4000DX00 4.00 ST4000DX001 4TB 3.5" Desktop Solid State Hybrid Dr 174.00
CRM500MS120 1.00 120GB M500 mSATA Internal SSD 72.99

He said it will run as good as the Lacie (which he says is owned by Seagate). So, I am happy.

When I get it, I will let you know if everything works OK.

Trig