Hi All,
Over the past couple of months (and a bit more) I've been in here doing research on external storage solutions. OreoCookie asked me to write up my experiences, hopefully this (long) will answer some questions people may have, and help them to avoid some of the snags I encountered.
Background: I'm a professional photographer (among other things) whose data storage situation was becoming desperate. Prior to getting my eSATA enclosure, I had about 2TB of drives full of projects and I was running out of room (a typical project for me takes up about 50GB these days, and it's only going to get worse as I move up the megapixel upgrade path).
At the time, I had two drives in my G5 desktop machine, and already three external (two 500GB LaCie FW800 enclosures and one 500GB LaCie NAS). I have a colleague with 9 external enclosures, and the cable snarl is legendary (and he's going to need more). I didn't want to go down that path, so I started looking for alternate solutions (btw: my archival strategy involved burning to DVD, which is no longer practical due to the amount of time it'd take to burn all the data waiting for archiving!).
I started
this thread to see what my options were. I got some great advice (thanks everyone), and it was my introduction to eSATA. Alternative suggestions were: archive to Tape (entry too expensive for me), xserve (waay too expensive ;-), a NAS (I've not been impressed with the throughput of NAS devices), and hardware SATA RAIDs (would've been nice, but relatively expensive and hardware RAID was not necessary for my needs, I learned subsequently that a software RAID would do me just fine).
After some more discussions, thought and research, I determined that a 5-bay eSATA enclosure with a port-multiplier was the way to go. 5-bays to give me expandability, and a port-multiplier version to reduce cable clutter. fyi: there are a few port-multiplier enclosures on the market that I found (I'm sure that there are more):
Sonnet Fusion 500P, Weibetech
SilverSATA V &
RT5 and
MacGurus Burly. btw: I found some great, comprehensive, reviews of several enclosures at the
AMUG site.
More research, more questions, so I started
this thread to learn more. OreoCookie and Mark Duell were again very informative and helpful (good links in this thread for those who want to learn more about RAID).
Why a 5-bay SATA solution? Well, I wasn't going for a full striped RAID as a video guy might (the 300GB throughput of eSATA sounds mighty impressive, but certainly not necessary for me as I don't do much video work any more). I planned to use a mix of JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) and RAID 0 (where two or more drives are striped together to vastly increase throughput over just one drive). This is how I was going to set it up: one very large drive to mount on the Desktop for in-progress work, two relatively small drives striped together in a RAID 0 configuration as a scratch disk (I use several programs that write to scratch extensively), the third bay for another JBOD for nightly backups and the 5th bay for an archival disk (as I finish projects, I'd move them off the working drive to the archive drive. When the archive drive was full, I'd pull it out of the enclosure, shelve it and put in a new empty one. This would replace my archaic and time-consuming method of archiving to DVD-R. Heck, dual-layer, even blu-ray, would not be as efficient).
By the way, I originally thought of having a second drive as a mirror of my working drive (another aspect of the RAID spec). I figured it'd be instant backup, but it was made pretty clear to me by OreoCookie that mirroring was definitely not the same as a backup: if two drives are mirrored, then if I make some sort of error on the working drive (erase a file, or rename hundreds of files), then that change would instantly be duplicated on the mirrored drive. Not a practical backup solution.
My original choice for a 5-bay port-multiplier enclosure was for the MacGurus Burly product (it'd require a software RAID, but that was ok for my uses). I got excellent advice and info directly from them, and I value that sort of customer service (I'm an expat Canadian living in the UK, and I miss the good customer service ethic of North America!). Unfortunately, they don't have a European distributor, and shipping such a device from the US was prohibitively expensive (even though their products are excellent, it wasn't worth it). Second choice (I _hate_ settling for second choice, but it turned out ok) was the Sonnet Fusion 500P, which _is_ available in Europe (again, it wasn't a hardware RAID). It was necessary for me to purchase a PCI-X port-multiplier SATA card (this has been the only snag: I can see myself moving to a Mac Pro in the middle-future, and I'll have to replace this card with a PCI-E version, unless future Macs have eSATA built in...c'mon Apple, it's only one small step from internal SATA to port-multiplier eSATA!)
My next step was to find drives with which to populate my enclosure (again, I needed a European source), so I asked in
this thread. Because of a mix of price and availability, I eventually purchased from
Microdirect, I quickly found a Seagate 750GB drive to use as my working drive and went looking for two smaller drives to use as a striped RAID 0 scratch disk. Much to my surprise, I found Western Digital Raptor drives in the list, at a very reasonable price. I have fond memories of Raptors from back in my video days (never failed, screaming fast), and so I wondered if striping two would make for a screaming scratch disk. I started
this thread to find out, and had a very informative conversation with art_director (who has a Weibetech RT5 hardware RAID enclosure, by the way).
I ended up buying my drives from Microdirect before getting the enclosure (how frustrating is that: my drives were sitting in a box and I couldn't use them!). I ordered the Fusion 500P and Sonnet PCI-X port-multiplier card (a Tempo X4P) from Sonnet distributor
Cancom (local to me, I much prefer to deal with humans when I can, rather than with a <form> tag at an online store). I got unusually good customer service from them (for the UK) and a price comparable to what I'd found online, so I can recommend a visit.
Well, when I was ready to make all of my purchases, it just happened to be around the time that a convenient Mac show was going to take place at a conference centre near by (MacExpo at Olympia, end of October '06). Great opportunity to talk to a Sonnet rep, if I could find one (and hopefully get a show special discount). Well, I did find a rep (took a while!), and she told me that, yes, the products were discounted for the show at Sonnet's various resellers. Score! Well, I subsequently found out that, no, prices weren't reduced for the show (bummer, and I hate it when reps will tell you whatever they think you want to hear). I also got a look at some of the Weibetech enclosures, very nice :-)
It took a while for my ordered PCI card to arrive, but once it came in, I had all of the necessary pieces. To summarise, I'd acquired:
1) Sonnet Fusion 500P 5-bay port-multiplier eSATA enclosure
2) Sonnet Tempo X4P
3) Seagate 750GB drive (as my "working drive")
4) 2 x 74GB Western Digital 10,000rpm Raptor drives (to be striped as scratch)
Christmas came early!
It was very easy to populate the enclosure with drives (pull out the tray, use the provided screws to attach the drive, slide it back into the enclosure). The AMUG reviewer
stated that there could be problems getting the drives back into the enclosure if the screws weren't flush, and the advice was appreciated. It was all very simple (well, the hardest bit was getting the PCI card in, but that has more to do with where my G5 sits than anything else: under my desk with a zillion cables attached which I didn't want to disconnect and so I banged my head a couple of times <sigh>).
I do wish that Sonnet had provided a 2 metre eSATA cable with the enclosure rather than a 1m cable. I couldn't find a 2m cable for sale from a European distributor, so I had to move various bit of equipment around in order to have the enclosure sit on top of my G5 (one minor inconvenience: as the AMUG reviewer stated, you can't open the 500P's door to hot-swap drives if it's sitting on top of a G5/Mac Pro because the computer's handles are in the way).
I plugged the populated enclosure into the single (yay!) eSATA cable and started my Mac. OSX got a little upset at these unformatted drives, but a quick visit to Disk Utility solved that problem. This enclosure may
require OSX to control the RAID (or SoftRAID, I understand), but it was very simple to RAID 0 the two Raptor drives, and the Seagate 750GB drive merely needed to be formatted to be used (JBOD mode).
I certainly don't regret getting the two 10,000 Raptors to stripe together for scratch, the data really flies (as a test, I opened forty 30MB multi-layer TIFFs and worked on them. I could see the LEDs of the scratch disks blinking away, but I experienced little if no delay while working, fantastic!).
Well, long post, but pretty comprehensive. I plan to populate the remaining 3 bays as necessary (fyi: backup at present is going to one of my external 500GB FW800 LaCie drives, which I labouriously emptied to DVD-R one weekend, thank you Toast disc-spanning feature! <phew>). I'm more than happy with the solution I have: tons of space, future-proof, seamless functionality (for my needs).
I highly recommend the experience ;-)
Chas
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