RAID 1 Experience?
 

Hi all:

I am hoping that some of you have some RAID 1 experience? I am setting up a P2 workflow for a documentary project and based upon reviews here and elsewhere, the CalDigit VR looks to be a contender. I would like the convenience and reliability of the RAID 1 workflow when downloading P2 cards to the drives.

In the past, I tried setting up a RAID 1 workflow using two physically separate drives of the same size and brand. I discovered that while the dumping portion of the operation went fine, when we would separate the two drives, wanting to send one of the drives to the editor and keeping one for safety, the separated drives would not boot correctly and were basically freaking out, looking for the other RAIDED drive. This was a few years ago, but I recall, we used Apple Drive Utility or some other third party software to set up the RAID 1. Is there some sort of formatting operation or option that is needed when you physically separate one RAID 1 volume from the other?

The CalDigit VR looks to be a great drive but I need a work flow that will allow me to dump all of the P2 cards to the two volumes, then I want to separate the volumes, one for backup and one to the editor. I contacted CalDigit and they told me that I am not allowed to switch out the drives on the CalDigit VR anyway, it voids the warranty and dark clouds of the Apocalypse will gather over our shoot. This sort of seems to negate the whole idea of the RAID 1 CalDigit VR workflow. I need a drive setup that I can setup as RAID 1, unload the drives, and then load new blank drives, format them and configure for RAID 1 again and do the same thing. My editor will need to take this RAID 1 formatted drive, mount it on his FCP system and edit away. Is this a strange workflow? What I have been doing instead of this is bringing two separate drives to shoots, dumping all of the cards to one drive, then cloning the cards in the breaks in between. This is stressful and non-automatic, it requires concentration and awareness of exactly what has happened to each P2 card. I can do that, but it requires either a P2 tech or a lot of my time and attention, which is tough as I am typically DPing and or producing the shoots as well.

I believe the CalDigit VR contains regular Hitachi SATA drives don't they? I cannot understand why, if I rotate the stock drives out with identical OEM drives from Other World Computing, it would void the warranty. The VR has easily removable drive trays. Why have removable drive trays if you cannot change out the drives? It seems to not make any sense.

Anyway,

1. Can you separate RAID 1 volumes on a hardware RAID 1 setup and use the two drives separately without the drives freaking out and looking for their RAID mate?

2. Has anyone used the CalDigit VR and successfully changed out new raw, SATA drives?

Thank you!

Dan Brockett

1. No, RAID needs 2+ drives to function.
2. I'm no expert, but CalDigit claims to have very good throughput speeds. John Flowers would argue, but unless you are editing RED footage, you should be fine.

I've got an external WD 2TB RAID1 rig and it needs both drives to operate.

One time a file on the 2nd drive got corrupted and when I powered it up, RAID1 took over and rebuilt the whole drive. It took 22hrs straight, for approx 250GB. Yeah they need each other.

Cheers.

The more information on the drive the longer to rebuild

Over-complication breeds failure. Keep it simple: use ShotPut to simultaneously offload footage onto (up to three) separate portable drives.

RAID 1 aka 'disk mirroring' needs at least two drives as one drive is the mirror of the other. It is possible to split a mirror set & is the sort of procedure that occurs all the time in the real grown-up computing world. For example a disk can be dropped out of a mirror set & physically removed so that the disk can be archived off-site. Another disk is added back to the RAID set & the mirror set is rebuilt. Long rebuild times occur when you are still actively using the RAID set while the rebuild is going on so updates. A simple clone of the surviving disk to create the second volume should take a lot less time.

However for your purposes as Mike points out over-complication breeds failure. You don't actually want a mirror set what you do want is two copies of the uploaded files on separate disks. ShotPut is your answer.

Cheers

Nigel