My ingest workflow is sending my ‘working’ RAW NEF files directly into my new MacBook, which has been purposely partitioned with 2 X 2.0TB Hitachi Deskstar™ 7K2000 HDD set up as Raid 0. def.(RAID 0 (striped disks) distributes data across multiple disks in ways that gives improved speed at any given instant).
Then by design to mitigate any problems with that setup, I will do a full synch against my working files using Chronosynch, to an external enclosure that has two independent esata 1T Toshiba HDD.
The data safety robustness of the workflow could have been improved and the capacity of going from 4T to 1T was going to hit a wall someday, and a hardware upgrade had been immanent……..well that wall came up early last Saturday when I ingested and backed up as part of my normal workflow. This time I had to put about 10 gig onto the 2nd external drive as the first one was a capacity. Three hours later an error message popped up from Drive Genius REV 3 that my RAID 0 was corrupt and that fix was to erase and repartition and rconfig the RAID…OMG…lots of work, but my data was secure on the external HDD’s.
To get me to a new level and solve the robustness and capacity issue, I turned to Lloyd Chambers site to look for enclosures recommendations. I knew that I had 4 X 1T HDD around , and that I had to move away from my limiting two separate enclosure and find something to put everything under one configuration.
To the rescue is the best product that I have seen come out of OWC in the three years that I have buying products from them. The product enclosure is the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2. This is the UBER ENCLOSURE.
It has everything and can be configured any which way via a selectable RAID switch. The power supply is built in (no more bricks !), the fan is quite (modulates to demand), the led status lights are not obtrusive, the grill and housing are made of quality aluminum, it has solid foot padding of 1/2 dollar size vibration rubber, it can be configured sub 2T or plus 2T, it’ll hold 4 X 2T drives, and it has every data transfer cable system that you could want, USB-2,FW400,FW800 or Esta. whew….
But the best part is that you can configure it as a RAID 5, because this enclosure is using an Oxford 936QSE chipset that enables that feature.
I had never heard of or used a RAID 5, but here is description excerpt from the quick start manual :
INSTALLATION & SETUP
I am a MAc user, so after loading up the four HDDs, turning of my MAC, plugging in the power cord and ESATA, then repowering up, the initialization message came up as portrayed in the manual via the MAC disk utility. I did hit a snag when I tried to partition my HDD, the drive would not reformat, and Disk Genius 3 helped to resolve that issue.
I had previously erased and reformatted two of the four HDD’s, so I’m thinking that maybe my issue, and for the past 24 hours I have had the new setup on erase free space to wipe everything clean, tonight I’ll defrag and then synch my working photos to this drive.
Reading the manual, I now understand that the maximum capacity of a RAID 5 configuration is the combined size minus the size of one drive. In my case, 4X1T-1T = 3TB…..which addresses my capacity issue, and the robustness issue is now addressed because if one drive fails, it can be replaced and the data rebuilt…….now where did I put that spare 1T HDD …..
Good stuff at an affordable price of $320
(drives not included)
