Suitability of the Apple-endorsed Promise SmartStor DS4600 RAID?
by Paul Dickin
on
Nov 12, 2009 at 4:27:25 pm
Hi
Is this good to edit from, using eSATA?
Its appeared on Apples Mac mini Server pages - at a price that's competitive with the box-shifters if you fill it with 1TB enterprise drives:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/TX711VC/A Apple don't mention its got an eSATA port, but its there in the pictures.
According to Promise its got an Oxford OXUFS936QSE port-multiplier RAID-type chipset.
That's sort of rung an alarm bell in my subconscious ;-)
[Bob Zelin]"this... is giving me an ulcer. Although it's been 2 years since
I've used Sil 31xx boards, I have COUNTLESS clients that have port multiplier products that use host cards or chassis that have this chip set as part of their drive configurations. ...You would see these products from Sonnet, Dulce, Cal Digit (Fasta 4e, 4x), and anyone else that used port multiplication with eSATA. I am glad that people that I trust have posted that it's still "working"... " Is this Oxford chip similarly likely to be unreliable in the longer term?
This Promise port-multiplying box doesn't seem to need an HBA with pm, which appeals to my sense of kiss-simplicity - I'm currently pussy-footing around a dozen eSATA cables spewing from the the back of my G5, with its two Sonnet x8 and 4+4 eSATA cards :-)
An affordable self-rebuilding RAID 5 or (RAID 10) solution would be nice...
(I can live with the single SATA-channel bandwidth limitation, and can run it from a UPS if that helps preserve the integrity of RAID 5 parity-writes).
Cheers
Re: Suitability of the Apple-endorsed Promise SmartStor DS4600 RAID? by Jerry Hofmann on Nov 12, 2009 at 4:41:23 pm
Well.. good is relative. What media formats? The suitability would be determined by how many streams of which format you want it to play... DV? no problem Uncompressed HD.. different story. It's not the fastest drive setup in the world but it may well be just fine for your actual needs.
Re: Suitability of the Apple-endorsed Promise SmartStor DS4600 RAID? by Paul Dickin on Nov 12, 2009 at 4:47:52 pm
[Jerry Hofmann]" ...it may well be just fine for your actual needs. " Hi
Bandwidth needs to be no more than I get with my multiple single-channel setup - all compressed formats.
It is Bob's ulcer-making long-term data reliability that I was wondering about...
Whether the lack of on-board battery-backup and write-cache ruled this sort of thing out for RAID 5?
Re: Suitability of the Apple-endorsed Promise SmartStor DS4600 RAID? by Arnie Schlissel on Nov 12, 2009 at 5:09:17 pm
If you want a RAID 5 option, then eSata is not for you. You should be looking at a controller with RAID 5 built in. Those controllers are either SAS or the lower end ones will use infiniband (multilane) cabling. Areca and Atto make the controllers, enclosures are available from a lot of manufacturers, including Sonnet.
Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
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Re: Suitability of the Apple-endorsed Promise SmartStor DS4600 RAID? by Jerry Hofmann on Nov 12, 2009 at 5:26:13 pm
Why not eSata? I agree there are better/faster Solutions but they cost more...
I was in Amsterdam showing the solutions from CalDigit, and ran into some users there that had HD one's etc.. and they were really happy with them. No need for more than one company for support too as they make the adapters as well.
Jerry
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