Network Attached Storage (NAS) for recording?

Capt. Snazzy

Capt. Snazzy

New member
I have been searching high and low for a device that would allow me the benefit of taking the recording load off of my internal hard drives (and lowering my cpu overhead in the process), and allow me to have my two daws recording to and playing from the same drive.
Has anyone come across such a device?
I have researched various NAS offerings (specifically the promise, thecus and buffalo technology units) , even the devices that support RAID 0 (striping) on SATA drives and have gigabit ethernet connections have a dismal sustained transfer rate (usually around 7MBps) making them unacceptable for recording application.
I know that many people use lacie or glyph external systems that connect by firewire or even USB 2.0, but that isn't an option for me, as the overhead incurred by the fireware/usb bus controller is exactly what I'm trying to escape (it is a substantial portion of the work your cpu is doing during recording and still quite high even for playback).
Basically, I'm just looking for the name of a company that makes a really fast NAS solution, preferrably one that supports RAID striping and has a sustained read/write average of at least 40MBps or so.
Is anyone else doing anything like this?
Am I stuck with internal scsi as my only real option for low/no overhead data i/o?
Thanks in advance for any feedback on this subject, you guys are always such a great resource.

Aaron
 
I think you'd be fine with a an external firewire hard drive if it does'nt have to be used by both machines at the same time. It would be swappable and I don't think an external drive would be that demanding on your resources. Otherwise, I have no clue.
 
I would really like to use it for both machines though, it's not a huge deal, I'm just kind of obsessed with the nerdy side of the home recording endeavor.
Right now I have one dual opteron with a four drive sata raid stripe, and one athlon 4400 x2 with a two drive sata stripe, it's not a lack of speed or space that is driving me on this search, it's merely trying to find a way to implement what I consider to be a better method of centralized audio data storage.
It would just be really nice to be able to bring up the exact same projects on both pcs, without having to import from one to the other, then export back to the original location once I'm finished editting.
I know large studios do this, but I'm beginning to think that they probably just implement a large multiprocessor server, with a huge scsi array with drives shared through windows networking, or something equivalent.
I can build a server to do this, I just wanted to know if anyone had come across a smaller, self-contained device, which would be much easier to implement.
 
Well, he is putting restrictions on Firewire and USB.

As I recall though, even the SANmp system uses Firewire. So, he probably doesn't want it anyway. ;)

While I am recording and playing back, there is no "substantial" hit on my CPU at all. Of course, I am not using a bunch of silly RAID crap either. I am can record over 24 tracks of 24/48 audio tracks at once, and can play back probably 100's of tracks!

With IDE buss drivers, they are quite efficient, so they don't tax the cpu. Also, generally speaking, the sound card driver takes advantage of DMA (direct memeory access) for the audio. So, while recording and playing back, much of the audio never see's the cpu.

So, I am not sure why this guy wants to avoid Firewire and USB solutions. If anything, those interfaces themselves might have restrictions. But the cpu pretty much doesn't come into play at all.
 
You're not going to find a NAS system that will be capable of such sustained rates. A Fibre Channel SAN as mentioned by Ford Van, would probably be the way to go, but it's way to expensive, and still you'll get better thruput with internal drives. You'll actually get some CPU hit with RAIDs. Today's single drives are more than capable of easily handling 48+ audio tracks by themselves, so there's really no need to use RAID 0 (or 5) for that matter, as you'll get a CPU hit, specially while writing. In fact, some of them are slower while writing, compared to single SCSI drives, specifically due to the overhead incurred of splitting the data among the drives. They're usually faster during searches, database operations, and maybe while reading multiple tracks. But overall, there's really no advantage to RAID systems, unless you have a dedicated RAID controller, and I don't mean the cheap ass things that come built into the motherboards with SATA or IDE systems.

If you're hell bent on having a centralized storage system, you can still go with a NAS, but not for realtime recording, but as more of an archival medium. You can work on the project on one computer, then copy the project folder to the NAS, and then copy that over to the other computer, work on that, and then copy that over to NAS... sounds kinda tedious, and it is, but it does give you the added advantage of having at least 2 copies of your project, just in case something goes belly up and you haven't yet backed things up.
 
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