Re: DAT Optics external RAID system

short update: Friday, Tim and I had made a couple of folders just to test the system out, mentioned in the original post. After playing around with the uncompressed HD clips, Tim decided to turn off the top box (hard drives 1 through 8) to simulate a failure in the power supply. I thought it was a bit extreme, and I was thinking it would have been enough to pull a drive out (or two) but there it was; eight drives off-line during a big write.

We waited a minute or two and powered the top box back on and the system was already trying to rebuild the drives. We left the editing bay and let it go, and on Saturday I came in and the report showed that the entire RAID completely rebuilt and restored the files and finished the transfer in 7 hours. It was done at 1AM Saturday!

The other thing that's kind of cool, (and kind of not) is that the system, which I've dubbed "BIG Fat Panda" named after Kung Fu Panda's leading character, actually e-mailed Tim and me to say that I had turned it back on; so we get reports in the event of a failure when I'm compressing or rendering overnight. What's not so cool is that Tim called to see why it took me until this afternoon to power up the RAID, "What have you been doing all day?" uh huh! (I was burning DVD's on the Dual G4... true story.

Stephen May
Keystone Media Productions
Freelance Videographer