Rack-Mountable Hard Drives

[thehouseofshawn]

With the speed of hard drives going up, and the advantages of rack setups with hundreds of GB or even in the terabytes...how many of you have used these before?
I noticed speeds of 10,000 to 15,000 rpm drives. And I've seen many rack hard drives that are swapable (I really think that's cool if you travel to studios a lot) and was wondering how many people here have ventured into these areas....

[thehouseofshawn]

Researching this, I ran across with the RAID term. In essence...what does this mean? A lot of drives I see can do 150MB a sec with the SATA drives. Is there something even faster?
I've seen the post about 1terabyte drives...and I agree with what some have said with the crashing of a disk or something. But all that really does is narrow it down to those cool rack hard drives that I've seen in PT demos.

[tollbooth]

hey there

i have a cheaper but effective solution that works for me

i have 4 Glyph NetDrive 400s. These vary in size but i have 2x80Gb and 2x120Gb drives. These aren't the dedicated rack drives that Glyph do, but i use them almost as a mini RAID system, where they work as two sets of backup drives -alternating a day's work between each group. i.e. day 1 backs up to drives A&B; next day backs up to drives C&D. the third day backs up to A&B again.

this means that i always have at least the previous day's work in two separate places.
end of each week i do a complete week backup to DVD.

not quite a RAID perse, and it DOES take a lot of discipline to get it right and not just switch things off at the end of the day, but it just becomes part of your routine.

i have them in a rack i made, so they are all in the one place. they are surge protected too as a group.

this cost me in the UK just short of £500. Glyph drives aren't the cheapest drives around, but i've had three other manufacturers FW drives crap out on me, and the Glyphs have been rock solid.

can't remember what platform you are on but word of warning - Glyph alsodo a FW800 NetDrive - there were some known issues with OSX Panther with these FW800 drives - quite serious ones. i've always had the FW400 so not an issue. don't know what the situation is with PC either. check Glyph's website for more info. may not even BE an issue anymore.

good luck

paul d

[tollbooth]

sorry - in this screen i see you are Mac based - yeah - definitely check the Glyph website about that FW400 vs 800 issue. they may have resolved it, but best be on the safe side.

just couldn't check your system details while i was typing earlier!

seeys

[wheelema]

A removable HDD is nothing more than a 3.5" HDD (PATA, SATA, SCSI), in a 5.25 enclosure mounted in a externally accessible 5.25" bay. Another, albeit more expensive solution, is to use USB drives. NewEgg should have some solutions.