Hi Guys
I'm in the process of looking for some kind of network based storage to store large quantities of audio and video data for a new research study that's starting soon.
We're in a bit of a strange situation here at work in that we're part of a university but we're based about 5 miles away from the campus. There's a Virgin Media line we pay a lease on that connects us to the uni's network at 100mb speeds which is generally fine for everything we do so far but is definitely not suited to transferring large video files. All the data storage is currently based on the campus, so the 2 choices we have are:
increase the VM line to gigabit and pay the extra on the lease then setup some data storage on the uni campus.
OR
buy some network based storage and have it setup locally here on the LAN in the building (which is gigabit), then use Attixs to backup the local storage to the uni's data backup centre over the 100mb line (it'll be slow but will just keep chugging away 24/7 until its updated anything thats changed).
Option 1 is being looked into, but I'd like to look into option 2 also as an alternative if the price of the lease increases too much.
So, Drobo's. I've been looking at the Drobo Pro, from all the reviews it seems like a damn good device! We've worked out that over the course of the study we'll have collected around 8TB of audio and video (some of it raw footage, some of it compressed) so I have been looking at a few 2TB drives to add into the Drobo for storage and redundancy. The video will be recorded on a Mac Pro and edited on there before going onto <insert storage solution here> where it will then be accessed by Windows XP and Windows 7 machines for analysis. HFS+ filesystem with the Macdrive software installed on the windows machines may be the best option here for cross platform access as some of the video files will be larger than 4GB so FAT32 is out the window and I've read that HFS only supports upto 2gb per file? alternatively NTFS with some Macdrive equivalent for the Mac Pro
Are these things as good as the reviews make out? Does the redundancy really work that well if one (or even 2) of the drives fail, your data should be fine?
Also I've never come across iSCSI before, I've done a bit of research into it but just want to confirm that I can just connect this upto an existing LAN with no issues - assuming an iSCSI initiator is installed on the systems? The Drobo website suggests that the Drobo Dashboard should be able to handle the iSCSI initiator on both Windows and Mac.
If anyone can offer any advise or suggestions, that'd be great
Thanks
I'm in the process of looking for some kind of network based storage to store large quantities of audio and video data for a new research study that's starting soon.
We're in a bit of a strange situation here at work in that we're part of a university but we're based about 5 miles away from the campus. There's a Virgin Media line we pay a lease on that connects us to the uni's network at 100mb speeds which is generally fine for everything we do so far but is definitely not suited to transferring large video files. All the data storage is currently based on the campus, so the 2 choices we have are:
increase the VM line to gigabit and pay the extra on the lease then setup some data storage on the uni campus.
OR
buy some network based storage and have it setup locally here on the LAN in the building (which is gigabit), then use Attixs to backup the local storage to the uni's data backup centre over the 100mb line (it'll be slow but will just keep chugging away 24/7 until its updated anything thats changed).
Option 1 is being looked into, but I'd like to look into option 2 also as an alternative if the price of the lease increases too much.
So, Drobo's. I've been looking at the Drobo Pro, from all the reviews it seems like a damn good device! We've worked out that over the course of the study we'll have collected around 8TB of audio and video (some of it raw footage, some of it compressed) so I have been looking at a few 2TB drives to add into the Drobo for storage and redundancy. The video will be recorded on a Mac Pro and edited on there before going onto <insert storage solution here> where it will then be accessed by Windows XP and Windows 7 machines for analysis. HFS+ filesystem with the Macdrive software installed on the windows machines may be the best option here for cross platform access as some of the video files will be larger than 4GB so FAT32 is out the window and I've read that HFS only supports upto 2gb per file? alternatively NTFS with some Macdrive equivalent for the Mac Pro
Are these things as good as the reviews make out? Does the redundancy really work that well if one (or even 2) of the drives fail, your data should be fine?
Also I've never come across iSCSI before, I've done a bit of research into it but just want to confirm that I can just connect this upto an existing LAN with no issues - assuming an iSCSI initiator is installed on the systems? The Drobo website suggests that the Drobo Dashboard should be able to handle the iSCSI initiator on both Windows and Mac.
If anyone can offer any advise or suggestions, that'd be great
Thanks
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