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Networked or eSata RAID Archive
Jordan Murph, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Honolulu & Los Angeles | HI/CA | USA | Posted: 2:53 PM on 12.26.07 |
->> Howdy gang,
I want to invest in a new storage solution for my archive to get away from my daisy chained Lacie drives. Essentially all it will have on it is an Aperture library file.
I've been researching this message board and the web for the past few weeks and I have narrowed my decision down to a networked RAID system or an eSata RAID system but I still have a lot to learn and ask.
I'm looking for some advice on what to buy in the neighborhood of networked RAID enclosures and eSata RAID enclosures. I'd like to purchase a pre-built system instead of building one from scratch.
I found the MacGurus site on another thread and for eSata, their systems look pretty cool: http://tinyurl.com/3dkox6 along with their eSata card for Express Card slots: http://tinyurl.com/29pyae
For the networked RAID option, I've only been able to find offerings from the big companies like Lacie and Western Digital.
Also, what will offer faster transfer rates? eSata or Ethernet?
What is the best option to manage a large Aperture library?
I want to start off with at least 1 terabyte of usable storage.
Any suggestions, advice, and product recommendations that could be offered would be greatly appreciated. I am on a MacBook Pro 15'' running Leopard 10.5.1.
Mahalo!
Jordan |
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Jon Thorpe, Photographer
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Toronto | On | Canada | Posted: 5:00 PM on 12.26.07 |
->> Lacie and WD are useless in a networked environment. WAY too slow.
I am currently looking into a Thecus N5200pro networked RAID enclosure. Its apparently the fastest one out there. It will not beat down your firewire 800 connections, but is pretty good.
http://www.thecus.com/products_index.php?cid=12
You can find them for around $800 without the drives. I plan on using 5x500gb WD SATA drives in mine. |
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John Cheng, Photographer
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New Milford | CT | USA | Posted: 11:40 AM on 12.27.07 |
| ->> Running Aperture over a networked volume will be too slow, as it is very I/O intensive. Not sure if this configuration is even supported. Also depending on the file system on the networked device, the file naming convetion inside the Aperture library may not be supported. |
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Jordan Murph, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Honolulu & Los Angeles | HI/CA | USA | Posted: 1:49 PM on 12.27.07 |
->> Thanks for info guys.
Anyone else have any info to share?
Mahalo!
Jordan |
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Jordan Murph, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Honolulu & Los Angeles | HI/CA | USA | Posted: 11:23 AM on 12.28.07 |
->> Any other suggestions folks?
Mahalo
Jordan |
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Dirk Dewachter, Photographer
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Playa Del Rey | CA | USA | Posted: 12:07 PM on 12.28.07 |
->> Jordan,
About a year and a half ago, I researched my archival system and up to that point I was archiving onto DVD's. Back then John Harrington wrote an extensive analysis on archiving images and it is still at http://www.prophotohome.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63119, which includes and excel spreadsheet on which you can configure your own cost analysis.
What was not included in detail in Harrington's analysis was to figure out how how much time I spent on burning these archival dvd's and based upon my own analysis, I would spend about 20 hours to burn a spindle of 100 dvds, which is about 400GB. Populating raided enclosures with two drives and formatting them properly takes less than five minutes and you are good to go for a while. Ever since I switched I have so much more time because I don't have to constantly burn dvd's.
In short, I bought into Harrington's philosophy and am glad that I did. I have two dual drive hardware raided drives attached to my Powermac via a dual eSata connection and they are fast fast fast. The hardware raided enclosures were purchased at Wiebetech (http://www.wiebetech.com) and their sales staff is informative and helpful but their tech support is the best I've encountered over the last few years.
The enclosures I have are SilverSata II drives, which require you to buy hot swappable trays for the OEM hard drives but since then they've come out with trayless technology, so you only have to buy the hard drives once you have the enclosures. The drives have dual feeds so you can have them eSata/USB or eSata/firewire and when I have an off site job I take one of them with me to hook up to my Macbook pro.
In essence, I have one enclosure for my original files, when I ingest the freshly shot events or assignments from Photomechanic I save one to the archival drive and the second to my edit drive (either a drive inside my powermac or the MBpro HD). The second raided enclosure is only used to move my finished work to from that edit drive, which includes my edited work, completed assignments, designs or anything else that is worth keeping.
Once each of these drive are full I drag it onto my printer icon and because I use Adobe Acrobat professional it can generate a content list of the root drive in pdf format. This pdf file is then imported into Excel and I strip some of the data out of it so I can actually sort and search a flat data base for a specific date, event or project.
I prefer to buy 250GB Hitachi's or Seagate drives from Newegg at about $65.00 each so no daisy chained Maxtors (Yikes) or other ones. My desk has a clean stack of two dual drive enclosures of which the HD's are hot swappable. Since I create two drives of everything, the second copy I drop off at one of my relatives homes for safekeeping. In comparison to DVD's my cost per GB is less after the first year but you gain so much more time because of the time expenditure in burning dvd's.
I did sign up for the 1TB photoshelter account but not for archival purposes - well in a way yes because it will allow me to access the most current work once it is migrated. |
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Kyle Coburn, Photographer, Assistant
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Providence | RI | USA | Posted: 11:37 PM on 12.28.07 |
->> Jordan,
I ordered a Lacie Biggest Quadra 2TB and have been using it for about a month. It is great, and almost full since I cleared off all my other HD. It is very fast, has eSATA and FW800 and 400 and USB. I run my Aperture library off of it and its so much faster than off my MBP poor internal drive.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10950
I will give a plug to powermax.com they had the best price I could find by about $50 on the 2tb model.
Good luck with your research Jordan! |
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Kevin M. Cox, Photographer, Assistant
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Galveston / Houston | TX | US | Posted: 1:15 AM on 12.29.07 |
->> We have an Infrant ReadyNAS at home and are about to buy another.
http://www.infrant.com
I'm been pretty happy with it. I went with network over directly attached (like eSATA, USB or Firewire) because Ashley and I use it at the same time and we can access it from laptops or even remotely over the internet without a computer turned on. |
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Justin Kase Conder, Photographer, Assistant
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Baltimore | MD | USA | Posted: 1:31 AM on 12.29.07 |
->> Hey Jordan,
Data Robotics is supposed to be introducing a new Drobo in the first quarter. I'm looking to do the same setup you mentioned, and hedging my bet that the newest Drobo will satisfy my needs... I hope I'm right.
If you'd like to read more on the Drobo a good place to start is this forum. I'd recommend clicking on the "Top Threads" towards the top.
http://www.drobospace.com/
The next viable option if you can't wait for the next version to come out is the ReadyNAS NV+ that Kevin recommends,
there is a discussion about it vs Drobo here:
http://www.drobospace.com/forum/thread/10303/Drobo-vs-ReadyNAS-NV-/
Hope that helps, let us know what you decide.
Justin Kase - the next star of VH1's "The Shot" |
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Aaron Vogel, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Ventura | CA | USA | Posted: 5:26 PM on 12.29.07 |
->> I'm gonna put in another plug the the Lacie Biggest Disk Quadra. I just go the 2TB model a short time ago and am pleased so far.
In regards to connection speed: in order of speed (theoretical max), slowest to fastest: 10 Mb/s Ethernet, USB 1.1, 100 Mb/s Ethernet, FireWire 400, USB 2.0, FireWire 800, 1000 Mb/s (Gigabit) Ethernet, eSATA.
The Quadra has USB 2.0, FW 400, FW 800 and eSata, which gives me a bunch of connection options I can use as I upgrade my system over time. I have all my video files on it because the RAID 5 setup makes for fast and safe video editing. My Aperture library is backed up in other ways, but eventually I'll be putting my video on a 4TB version of the drive and using the 2TB for the Aperture library. I like options basically. |
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Aaron Vogel, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Ventura | CA | USA | Posted: 5:48 PM on 12.29.07 |
->> OH, I also forgot to mention that you may not want to go with the MacGurus option as it requires a software based RAID implimentation. These are a less desirable choice than hardware based RAIDs.
Here's a PDF that explains this more: http://tinyurl.com/2f8lfw
Also, in case you haven't read it, here's Apple's Pro Techniques Storage Solutions primer PDF: http://tinyurl.com/25ba5s
Vanguard makes a sick 5-Bay Firewire 800 / eSata external hardware RAID drive: http://tinyurl.com/k9bmb though it's a little pricey
The Lacie Biggest Quadra I mentioned is also and eSata hardware RAID: http://tinyurl.com/35zan2
Just wanted to throw that info out there for ya. |
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Ron Scheffler, Photographer
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Hamilton (Toronto area) | Ontario | Canada | Posted: 1:02 AM on 12.30.07 |
->> Just want to point out that if you go with RAID (in your case it will be an external RAID box if you want a large RAID 5 array), you still need some sort of back-up for that data. A potential problem is if the RAID controller hardware goes bad down the road and you are no longer able to find an exact replacement. It could mean that your existing array is unreadable by other RAID solutions, leaving you out of luck (which just happened to a friend who created a RAID system with older used equipment purchased on ebay).
Yes, RAID offers convenience of working from a single volume and if it's RAID 5, allows for a large capacity volume with some redundancy... But don't consider it as the best/only archival solution.
Aaron makes a good point that if you go with the Macgurus solution, the only way you'll get RAID out of that via your laptop is with software RAID implemented through Disk Utility. Of the RAID 0 and 1 options, only RAID 0 will allow a large TB+ volume, which is the most risky and for what you're doing, least recommended RAID option due to lack of drive parity redundancy. If you're going to work from the laptop, then you will need to find a RAID box like some of those already suggested that supports RAID 5 for at least redundancy against single drive failure. If you had a desktop with expansion card slots, then you could buy a RAID card to control the drives in the Macgurus eSATA box.
Another detail to look at with RAID: does the RAID solution allow for online capacity expansion? This means, can you increase the amount of storage in the RAID array without first having to reformat the entire array? Some allow this, others don't. Having to reformat what is likely the largest amount of storage you have available in order to increase it is obviously inconvenient and something to avoid. It's one of the big selling points of the Drobo solution and I hope Justing Kase is correct that they will announce something with a connection other than USB soon. |
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Clark Brooks, Photo Editor, Photographer
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Urbana | IL | USA | Posted: 11:59 AM on 12.30.07 |
| ->> I am seriously looking at the drobo unit to replace my current system of netgear toasters (which have worked pretty well for me). Anybody using one currently? If so, what are if any drawbacks besides it being USB 2.0? Good, bad or ugly???? |
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Kevin Nibur, Photographer
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Livermore | CA | USA | Posted: 12:28 PM on 12.30.07 |
->> I have a two disk RAID enclosure made by Sans Digital which appears to be identical (accept in name) to the Wiebetech Dirk referred to. After reading this thread I'm realizing it may have some disadvantages. Dirk, once you move one of the copies to a relatives house, can you still access the remaining drive? In other words, will anything accept the original enclosure work with it, and if so will the enclosure function properly with only one disk in it? I'm asking here in hopes I don't have to figure this out by experimenting with valuable data.
If not, is there any good methods out there to mirror two drives, so I always have a backup, but that allows the drive to be read through a simple single disk USB enclosure once the copy has been moved away to a safe place?
I'm not concerned about top notch transfer speeds and such. I think what I want is just a way to keep an ongoing backup, which, when full can be moved to two locations and still have the data be useable. |
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Dirk Dewachter, Photographer
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Playa Del Rey | CA | USA | Posted: 1:14 PM on 12.30.07 |
->> Kevin,
Wiebetech's Silversata II is either raid 0 or 1 and it is a hardware raid. I have it set as RAID 1 because I want the two drives to be mirrored / identical, so i have two copies of everything. Once the data is on them I no longer add or delete from these drives and only access them to retrieve images through copying what is on the respective drives. I don't like large storage volumes because the larger it is, the higher the risk that you may lose it all and that is why I prefer the smaller 250GB hardware raided enclosures. I don't always need to access items that are over six months to a year old so I prefer to off load that onto raid1 mirrored drives and store them. It only takes a couple of minutes to swap them out and pull the data.
I can insert only one of them into the silversata II housing and leave the other drive bay open to retrieve images from it, it does not require to have both hard drives in the enclosure to retrieve the data. I do realize that the particular drive used to retrieve the data will now have a different file allocation table but since it is for storage purposes only I am not worried about it because if the drive goes bad, i have the other copy at my relative's house, which I would then use to rebuild a new second copy to replace the hard drive that went bad.
If you place one drive in the primary slot of the silversata II and you power it up, when you insert your second drive it will automatically duplicate the primary drive onto the secondary to make an exact copy. If you place two drives in there at the same time the and you format them for use, it won't matter.
I also spoke with Wiebetech about getting just a single bayless RTX drive so I can remove the tray from the filled up drives and re-use the trays that I need for the silversata II. As long as the format of that drive can be read by your system you can place that drive in any housing that is connect by either firewire, esata or usb it doesn't matter. For example, initially I formatted the drives for fat32 because I wanted to be able to use the storage drives on both my mac and pc but i have since then abandoned that and only format them for the mac because of the 4GB cap for single files on the fat32 side.
I selected the silversata II because it is a hardware raided enclosure and don't trust software driven raids. I also use only 250GB drives because they are (1) more economical and (2) if something goes bad with both drives at the same time, I only lose 250GB of data instead of 500 or more. The other posters on here made some good points pertaining to the software raids as opposed to the hardware raids that if the software fails you may be out of luck especially if the software company went out of business or no longer supports it. |
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Jordan Murph, Student/Intern, Photographer
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Honolulu & Los Angeles | HI/CA | USA | Posted: 10:36 PM on 12.30.07 |
->> Wow, thanks for all the information everybody. It's greatly appreciated.
I'll let you all know what I go with.
Mahalo
Jordan |
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Lee Love, Photographer
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Herndon | VA | US | Posted: 11:58 PM on 12.30.07 |
->> Hey Jordan did you realize that your Mac has Raid built into the OS ?
This is not a total solution but I currently use two 1 TB FW 800 drives that are mirrored using the capability built right into OSX.
Now I understand all of the hardware/software raid issues and the problems with upgrades and if Drobo comes up with a FW 800 I might eventually go that route. But for now my 1TB drive is mirrored at that at least gives me a low cost redundant solution for my Aperture reference images.
Again I am not recommending this as "the" long term solution but it does give you a level of redundancy with the system you currently have. |
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Jeff Etessam, Photographer, Assistant
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Dallas | Tx | | Posted: 7:59 PM on 01.02.08 |
->> Jordan,
I have been researching many of the same issues as you. I decided against a RAID array and decided to go with a multi bay hot swap capable enclosure. One drive will be no more than a back up of the working drive. With hot swap, I can make a back up to the back up drive and store it off site.
In RAID I (mirroring) anything happening on one drive will happen to the other. An image somehow gets corrupted on one and it is automatically corrupted on the mirror disc. You accidentally delete an image on one disc and it's gone from the other as well.
For my purposes, it made more sense to have a "working drive" which get scheduled backups, but remains independent of the first drive. YMMV. |
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Brian Westerholt, Photographer
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Kannapolis | NC | USA | Posted: 10:30 PM on 01.02.08 |
| ->> For those of you that are storing hard drives off site, I was under the impression from what I have read on this board in other posts in the past, that if a hard drive is not used for a long period of time, such as being kept in a safe deposit box, after a while it will no longer work. |
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Avi Gerver, Photographer
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New York | NY | USA | Posted: 11:52 PM on 01.02.08 |
| ->> Has anyone here experienced drive failure from a drive that was sitting unused for awhile? It seems logical, but I'm not sure not starting up a hard drive is the same as not starting up a car. Does anyone know for sure? |
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Chuck Steenburgh, Photographer
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Lexington | VA | USA | Posted: 10:40 AM on 01.03.08 |
->> I would not recommend leaving a backup to sit for long periods of time.
Your off-site backup system should involve regular rotation of drives; this allows you to check for integrity. For example, consider using two off-site drives and swap them out weekly. I would definitely NOT simply fill up a drive and park it somewhere.
Back to Jordan's original question: I currently have two on-site backups: external eSATA drives (not RAIDed) as well as a network SATA RAID 5 archive on my file server in the next room.
The eSATA backup provides me with fast local access to my backups. The networked machine provides me with a remotely accessible backup that I can reach from anywhere. Not to mention a backup workstation if my main workstation goes down. While the networked archive was kind of slow, since upgrading to a 1000mbps Ethernet system it is much more useable. |
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Michael Stevens, Photographer
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Phoenix | AZ | USA | Posted: 10:40 PM on 01.07.08 |
| ->> Another consideration is RAID level. RIAD 5 allows the failure of one drive while retaining data integrity. The new kid on the block is RAID 6 which allows 2 drive failures while still leaving the data intact. At first I didn't understand why that's that big of a deal but the explanation is pretty simple: Large volumes of data take some time to initialize. I've got a 1.5 terabyte array at my day job which took quite a few hours (4+) to initialize with a Dell controller (not the best). If you have a drive failure and are in the middle of reinitializing the array and another drive fails for some reason... guess what just happened to your data? Bye bye... |
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Warren Wimmer, Photographer
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Orland Park | Il | USA | Posted: 10:05 AM on 01.08.08 |
| ->> I am using the Drobo with 4ea 1 tb in each slot (plug and play). It is great. (just using as storage)I have anohter on order. They are on Amazon now cheaper than Calumet where I got my first one. The drives I got from Frys aprox 350 US each. I had so many external dasiy chained together that it was slowing down the tower's performance |
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