I almost bought the Sonnet enclosure but went with the Firmtek 5PM based on this review. Rock solid.

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/firmtek/5pm

We've had good success with the G-Tech G-Speed eS drives and Avid. So far no issues reported from our customers on either Win or Mac platforms. They can be configured as a RAOD 0, 1 or 5. They ship with teh HighPoint RAID controller card. Very easy to set up and configure.

The new G-RAID Pro announced at NAB looks very promising - If they listen to their custoemrs and add eSata support to it. From what I've been able to gather they got the message.

Gary

Wow, the FirmTek unit does look very nice.  Now, of course, the decision is going be harder to make.  Here's how I see them stacking up (please feel free to correct any misunderstandings on my part):

1.  $629 for the FirmTek set-up for my MacBook Pro.  Hard drives extra:  Maybe $125/drive, times five...  PROs: good price; CONS: not sure, except, maybe, a bit fussy to use compared to the Wiebetech; no RAID (that I can see)                                                                                          

 total approx. $1400 (with SATA ExpressCard controller)

2.  $1699 for the Sonnet, which does come with five 500GB hard drives; SATA ExpressCard controller for MacBook Pro is extra $99.                                                                                      

total approx. $1,800

3.  $2,300 for Caldigit HDOne, includes 2T worth of hard drives.  I can't tell whether you can add more of your own hard drives or not.  PROs: seems to me, faster all round ("up to 20GBps", according to the Caldigit web site "400Mbps in RAID 5"; supports 10; RAID 5 out of the box (RAID 0,1 and 6 also available); CONs: I suspect you can't add (or remove) hard drives - - not as versatile for me.

total:  $2,300

4.  And there's still the Wiebetech option:  http://www.wiebetech.com/products/RTX400.php

The two-bay model, at $300, has two "trayless" bays, so you just pop in your SATA drives, no enclosure necessary.  PROs:  very easy to use; CONs:  no RAID.  Need SATA ExpressCard controller for MacBook Pro, no doubt.  Add the cost of five drives, at approx. $125 each (I realize you can only use two at a time (or maybe, if I correctly understand Job's first post on this thread, you can only use one drive at a time?)

total:  approx. $1,000

Any thoughts on the how the above stack up?  

Malcolm

Malcolm, there's no point buying the preconfigured sonnet bay.

Buy the ENCLOSURE only.

Then add your own drives. that way the enclosure is about $600, then add 750gb drives to however many you want. They run about $125  each. So if you had the 5 drives added, that sonnet tech would cost you about $1100, plus the expresscard.

Damon

The two-bay model, at $300, has two "trayless" bays, so you just pop in your SATA drives, no enclosure necessary.  PROs:  very easy to use; CONs:  no RAID.

They may have RAID boxes as well, and I know they also carry a 4-bay SCSI variant. 4 SATA drives in trayless bays, SCSI U320 port on the back.

 Malcolm, I had a look at the Firmtek Seritek 5pm, and yes, it does look pretty good. the fan speeds and front quick on / off are a few extra features over the Sonnet tech, and its about $70 less.

either one is a winner.

Damon

 Oh, and another thing, the Caldigit seems much too overpriced for what it is.

These days, anything for "PRO and or FILM and or VIDEO" use seem to automatically have inflated prices.

Sonnet and Seritek are a much better choice to me.

Damon

Thanks Damon, and to Job, funckdren and videoguy as well.  I'll post back if I hear anything else (I've emailed Sonnet and Wiebetech), or if I have any more questions (likely).

Cheers, Malcolm

Malcolm,

Not sure what you mean by "no RAID" for the Firmtek enclosure. It's fully RAID configurable. You can stripe the five SATAs together and get speeds of 210 mb/sec.

I also like Firmtek because the word on the street is that all their engineers came from Apple -- their stuff always integrates well with Macs. I believe that their 2-port external SATA card is the only one out there you can boot from.

Good luck.

Hi all,

Just thought I'd report back... in case what one of the hard drive vendors told me helps to separate one league from another, when it comes to video editing... or more likely this only pertains to the question of RAIDed drives.

He said, as to why the Caldigit HDOne was more expensive, that it's 100% hardware RAID, whereas all the others are probably software RAID.  In his opinion, this makes a huge difference.

Anyone care to comment on this?  Is hardware RAID much faster, and much better?

And on the same subject, if you have the patience:  do I absolutely need RAID 5, or whatever it is that you have for security?  I swore to myself I'd get it, because I did have a hard drive crash a year ago, and lost a lot of work.  But in that particular case I'd captured tapes without time-code (don't ask), so I really had to go back to square one.  In most cases (and say, for me, working from EX-1 footage, that I'll have backed up to a separate hard drive for the sake of having a copy of it safe on a shelf even before I start editing), if there were a crash, wouldn't I just batch-capture my sequence back into shape?  (I might lose just an hour or two)

Malcolm

Hardware Raid does all the heavy lifting of managing the five drives and lets your computer not worry about that.  That is a good thing.

Raid 5 becomes more important the large the raid is - i.e. how much material is on the array.  If you have 20 hours of SD on a Raid 0 array and 1 drive fails, ALL 20 hours of material is gone.  If the raid is one of the secure variants (Raid 5 for example) then you are annoyed for a short time, but not really out of luck.  Raid 5 does impact performance (depending on the system) but is insurance for you business.

Jef

Malcolm,

It doesn't sound like you're interested at all in RAID 0, which is primarily a higher-risk speed gain. Sounds like you want RAID protection. So, unfortunately, there's not an easy answer. RAID 1 and RAID 5 will both give you the redundant security you want, but you'll sacrifice something with either one...

RAID 1 mirrors your drives but mercilessly cuts your storage capacity in half. RAID 5 really needs four to six drives to function properly (it removes one drive to protect your data) but it is CPU intensive and is not recommended for write-intensive work. Of course, that problem improves if you go with a hardware RAID, but then you pay quite a bit more in $.

Any way you slice it, all RAID configurations cost you something. Just need to decide what's appropriate for your project, risk, and budget needs. Hope that helps.

 With the advent of HD and the availability of cheap large quantity harddrives many post like these surfaced on the forum. I don't know if it will answer any of the questions you still have, but here's a small lexicon on the subject based on the information i found so far, since in the dizzying world of storage the tech terms overwhelmed me at first.

One note in advance, please note the difference between Mb/s, which is Megabit per second and MB/s, which stands for Megabyte per second. As each byte consists of 8 bits, there is quite a difference. Mb/s is usually used to describe the bandwith a video stream needs, MB/s is used to describe the throughput a harddisk is able to provide. However, both firewire and USB use Mb/s to describe the maximum throughput these protocols are able to handle (yes by all means lets keep it simple shall we?) Hope it helps you a little.

(p)ata paralel advanced technology attachment, the cheap old interface to connect a harddrive, allowed transfer speeds up to 133 MB/s

sata serial advanced technology attachment, the successor of pata, and comes in two (compatable) flavours, sata1, which soon was succeeded with sata2. Sata 1 allows transfers speed up to 150 MB/s, Sata 2 up to 300 MB/s. Sata offers faster transfer speeds then either firewire or usb, as the fastest of those, firewire 800 (Mb/s) only allows transferspeeds up to 100 MB/s

e-sata external serial advanced technology attachment, same as sata really, to connect a harddisk to the computer externally. It has a slightly different shaped connector though, which is better suited to the rigours of life outside the computer case. The downside is that its not as easially recognized by the operating systems we use today, and needs specific software drivers... This will no doubt change with the advent of newer OS's. Also note that this connection is purely build for harddisks, and other drive based equipment, such as dvd/blueray burners an their ilk. it is not as versitile as either firewire or usb.

Ok so much for the transfer protocols. Of course there is also scsi and serial attached scsi, but we were looking for cheap storage, and scsi and sas are anything but. All these transferspeeds are theoretical of course, because no single drive we can afford will ever reach those transfer speeds. Most modern sata drives top out at 70 MB/s, this speed rapidly decreasing as the drive fills with files to a meager 30 MB/s. Hence the nifty nerds in devellopement came up with harddisk raid...

raid Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks or in short a way to up the transfer speeds a harddisk can deliver, by throwing a few disks together so the computer thinks its one drive instead of many. That way speeds add up, how much they add up depends on the type of raid and the number of drives

raid0 the simplest, cheapest, fastest and most dangerous raid. If the computer says write, all disks write, the same goes for read. However, if one disk in such raid fails, all files are lost. So calling this one redundant is stretching it a bit to be honest, as a drive will always fail according to Murphy's laws.

raid1 not a way to go faster really, only there to deal with the mishap of drive failure. In effect it mirrors the read write actions on one drive to the other. if one of both drives fail, replace it and the raid will rebuild, copying all info on the remaining drive to the new one. Very redundant, not a way to achive faster transfer speeds.

raid 2 to 4 other ways of raiding disks, by now redundant and replaced by raid 5 and 10. Note that for raidsystems other then 0 and 1, you will need more then two disks to let them work, the more the better.

raid 1+0, or raid 10 for short. Just adding the two explained above, having best of both worlds, highest speed and no panic (well a little maybe) if a drive fails. However you need 4 drives to pull this one off though, each pair running in raid 0 and then mirrored, cutting the available space of the four drives in half. (or the other way around of course)

raid 5 ok this is a tricky one to explain. Say you have 3 disks, A, B and C in raid 5, disk A and disk B work as raid 0, adding their speed as data goes to and from them. However, each time a zero or a one is written to these drives, a calculation (A+B=C) is made and the result of that calculation is written on drive C. If drive A fails and is replaced, the raid set is rebuild by reversing the calculation (C-B=A). If C, aka the parity drive, fails, the calculation is just repeated (A+B=C). This sounds perfect of course, allowing you much more diskspace then raid 10 with the same redundancy, but it comes at a price. Because of the calculation you have to make, it will never be as fast as raid 0, and while rebuilding, the speed of the raid drops significantly. This is where the difference between hardware and software raid will show. Also this type of raid will profit in speed mostly if the number of attached drives is increased. 4 is good, 8 is way better, 16 is king (and way out of our league if we look for cheap). 

Right now there are many different raid cards available, running on several types of connections (PCI, PCI-X, or PCI-express) or even incorporated in the motherboard. The main difference between the cheap and the expensive ones is if they allow hardware or software based raids

Software based raid The raid card takes care of connecting the cables, but all calculations to sustain the raid are handed to the CPU of the computer, slowing it down significantly if you use raid 5. This type of raid can also be found in most operating systems of today, when you connect drives to the motherboard.

Hardware based raid Besides the connections for disks, the raid card contains a specially designed chip for raid calculations, doing it much faster then the cpu is able to do, and not burdening it with raid work. Of course the downside is that they are more expensive.

Then there is cables and port multipliers and boy did the marketing people put a spin on this one. If they promise to send several layers of uncompressed HD over one little cable, they are lying through their teeth afaik. (small addition here, there is one cable capable of this, and thats the one that extends the pci-e slot outside the computer, like the new line-up of avid hardware does)

e-sata cable the 'rugged' version of the sata cable. Note that the maximum data transfer through such cable never exceeds the maximum the sata protocol allows you.

port multipliers a way to connect up to four drives with one sata cable. This has nothing to do with raid. It's just a way to connect more drives to the computer with less cable clutter. Also note that it doesn't increase speed in any way... chances are the cable becomes the limiting part in transfer speeds, as the max throughput will be 300 MB/s at best.

multilane cable If you want less cable clutter, go for this one. its 4 sata cables banded together in a single wire, with a really rugged connection on each end. High quality comes at a higher price of course...

Ok, back to work, i may edit/add some info if required later.

Well, I’ve got disks covered, the cables… now how to connect all this to your motherboard/cpu? Of course this can be done in various ways and by various slots on your motherboard. Some motherboards offer a raid setup including the raid chip, for others you can use a card containing the needed chips in roughly three types of slots found today

PCI slot, or the Peripheral Component Interconnect, the oldest one of the lot, running often at 32 bits in various voltages and versions Mostly used for audio and firewire cards to use with avid dna products. And boy is this thing limited and slow. The limits consist of the fact that no matter how many there are in your PC, they all connect to the same entry of the CPU, aka bus. Having 2 CPU’s allows you a little more headroom, cause you then you have 2 busses available but you’ll have to go through the motherboard manual to find out which slot belongs to which CPU. The fact that its slow is part of the reason AVID dna hardware wants the bus to the CPU for itself. The peak bandwith being a meagre 133 MB/s shows you why adreanaline never was able to pump out many streams of high resolution video. This limit wasn’t only felt by us editors which led to the:

PCI-X slot, or the Peripheral Component Interconnect Extended (trust me on this, besides being a mouthful, the X standing for eXtended caused loads of confusion… I’ll get to that). This thing is usually found in workstations, running 64 bit, in various versions, voltages, 100 and 133 Mhz etc. the fastest able to bring you a bandwith of 1064 MB/s…. now we are talking. Of course it has the same limitation as the normal PCI variant: plug a raid card in it, and make sure not of the other slots connecting to the same bus are filled if you want/need that speed. It is expensive to build, cumbersome, so again the engineers went to the drawing board and came with its successor, the:

PCI-e slot, aka the PCI-express, or Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, its name causing a wave of confusion much like the MB/s and Mb/s thingy. Now this is a total new design and in no way compatable with the previous versions of PCI. It doesn’t use busses, it uses ‘lanes’, the serial approach. Depending on your motherboard you have a limited number of those lanes, it can be 20 to 48. Each lane allows a transfer of 250 MB/s. There are a number of different slots with PCI-e on each motherboard:

x1 which means that slot is connected to 1 lane allowing 250 MB/s bandwith

x4 which means this slot is connected to 4 lanes allowing 1000 MB/s bandwith

x8 and x16, the last one allowing a whopping 4000 MB/s bandwith, and this is the one usually fitted with the videocard of the system. x4 and x8 are those used for the raidcards, and for avids new DNxHD hardware. So you see the number of lanes your motherboard/computer has available will be the new number to look at.

Ok if you came this far you are officially a nerd/techhead. The missus returned home, and she wants dinner… promised to do the cooking today, will continue laterz.

rinzeshuurman - - that was much appreciated.  I've read it a couple times, and will read it a couple times more before posting back with any questions... and you're so right about spin, on the part of these manufacturers... anything and everything they say on their websites makes their product sound the best.

Thanks so much for this, Malcolm

Malcolm,

Just re-read your original post -- bear in mind that at 35 MB/sec, a plain old software RAID 1 will protect you and be plenty fast with typical SATA drives. (Of course, maybe you're planning for the future with projects that require faster speeds.)