Just a note, if you're going with SATA drives above 500G, you really
do want RAID6, especially if you're going to build your own. The time
required to rebuild a RAID5 on these larger drives means that the
probability of a second drive failure before the rebuild finishes goes
up, especially if you bought all your drives from the same vendor and
out of the same manufacturing lot.

We've had a couple of instances where RAID6 across larger drives has
saved our bacon, because a second drive failed during rebuild.
Especially with 1 and 1.5TB drives, I don't trust RAID5 to be enough
protection for that much data.

-Sven

On Sep 11, 2009, at 7:30 AM, David Krause wrote:

Yep you would be hard pressed to make that work from a performance
standpoint, unless your artists are mainly Photoshop etc. But if
you had to...I would forget the RAID 6 and stick with RAID 5, get
the artists to work locally wherever possible, and either render at
night or if you have decent switching set up QoS to throttle back
the renderfarm requests.

I had to support 15 Maya artists a few years back in a 'transition
phase' that lasted 3 months! Used an IBM x445 and a single Xraid as
DAS. Good times.

Dave

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com [studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com ] On Behalf Of Darcy Danger Reno [peetoose@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 6:29 AM To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Subject: Re: windows storage server

Agreed - It wouldn't work well and would be a disposable purchase.

This would actually be a good application for one of the BackBlaze
boxes.

Once you get through this transition phase - the system would still
be useful as a nearline backup or snapshot server of some sort.

darcy

On Fri, Sep 11, 2009 at 3:00 PM, Terry Dale Terry.Dale@starz.com
wrote: With only 8 drives the load of 10 artists will grind your server to
a hault never mind adding the 30 render nodes. You need to get your
spindle count up if you want any kind of reliability.

Terry

Terry Dale Starz Animation Toronto Sent from Blackberry From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com To: discuss@studiosysadmins.com Sent: Fri Sep 11 01:10:15 2009 Subject: windows storage server anyone have experience with windows based storage solutions?
Something like Raid6 with 8 drives to serve 10 artists and less than
30 render nodes, 4 GigE ports?

i need to bridge a storage gap in our IT transition right now and
need a temporary solution that is leans more on safe than fast.

thanks

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss

_ StudioSysAdmins-Discuss mailing list StudioSysAdmins-Discuss@studiosysadmins.com http://mailman.studiosysadmins.com/mailman/listinfo/studiosysadmins-discuss