SATA RAID Setups

[FarrisPhoto]

I know this has come up in the past, but I am now ready to drop some bucks on a SATA RAID setup. I would like at least 4 drives and RAID 5 capability. The cost of 1 Tera drives is now below 200 US. I am hoping prices continue to fall so that I can stock up. I really like the look of the Drobo unit but it is only USB or Network and 2 Terabyte Max with a somewhat modified Raid O mirror set up.
Thanks guys, I am really looking for reliable unit and I know your are the smartest bunch out there!

Mr. Yang

[NickT]

I'd avoid the Drobo Mr Yang, had some good initial write ups but I've heard a few horror stories..
Your best bet is to talk to the guys at Macgurus.com, the head guy there used to be a photographer, they really really know RAID.
Nick-T

[HughGilbert]

My digital plumber, one Paul Ellis, says that weibitech disk holders are good... best thing is that you don't need trays, they really plug and play like floppies used to...

Now, as this is the weather section,

I'm grumbling, beastly cold here in Sussex and low clouds.  Clearly Monty is buried under a heavy snow drift up in Yorkshire..>!

All best


hugh@hughgilbert.com

[Chris Crumley]

Neal,

I'll be second to vouch for MacGurus. I bought a Burly 8-bay enclosure from them about two years ago and have populated it with 8 Seagate 750gb drives. It is driven from a Sonnet controller card in the MPro Intel. So far, it is solid as a rock. Currently, I've about filled the 6th drive which gives me two to go.

The enclosure is dedicated to shoot year folders and individual shoot folders; 6x750 holds my entire work on-line. The shoot folders were fed into Lightroom to build the database; 136,000 records and my tech wrote a program to extract captions and keywords from a Protfolio database. It provided LR with 1.6 million keyword indexes. The LR database with 1:1 previews for all files takes a little less than 200gb on one 750gb internal in the MPro. The marriage works well.

I wanted to start with a JOBD setup for the simplicity. Next step may be a RAID, so I'll watch this thread. I can see another Burly 8-bay in my future and will have to decide how to configure the parallel databases, a JBOD duplicate that Retrospect maintains or some sort of RAID arrangement.

[FarrisPhoto]

Sorry to intrude into the weather section. Nick suggested to post here for now. I don't know if mixing Nature with technology is a great idea, but I had no choice.
On the weather note,
A beautiful spring day in Texas. Working on a new storage shed for my house. I have spent two months building a 8X12 shed that will hold junk!
I did come up with a great finish idea. I used smooth cement board (hardiboard) for the outer walls and am painting them with chalkboard paint for the kids to draw on. 
Hope to be finished with the bloody thing by fathers day (US).
Thanks for the info, keep it coming, I am presenting Tues to IT guys what I want.