Best solution for media storage

No one can tell you which, of the hundreds of possible storage solutions, is best for you.
We have lots of experiences posted here, just search for the products and models you are considering. Most of the posts here are negative because that's when we hear from folks.

but if you are trying to do this at a college, you had better get your IT people involved.

bogiesan

LaCie's are hit or miss in my experience as far as dependability.

Maxx Digital makes great stuff for video editors.
CalDigit has some great raid solutions as well if your school has a little more money.
Look for eSata and/or FW800 solutions with redundancy if your stuff is important!

I would also add that it depends what media you are going to be working with. I would not want to be trying to work with 1080p off of a firewire 800 box. We have had a lot of success with the proavio SAS boxes and are currently working in 2k

http://www.proavio.com/

Liam.

Look into drobo (http://www.drobo.com/resources/drobodemo.php) - It's expandable up to 16 Terabytes, so you won't run out for a while. The great thing about Drobo is that works on any SATA drive, so you can plop existing ones in there and buy 500 GB SATA drives as you need them.

I agree about the Lacie. I had a 1 TB drive, and one day everything was gone. It took me weeks just to get it to work again, but the data was lost forever. I don't recommend Lacie drives at all. I have heard (including my own) too many bad experiences with Macs. Interestingly enough I haven't heard so many with people that have PCs.

I'd do some research on the Drobo, if you intend to edit with it...

http://discussions.apple.com/search.jspa?threadID=&q=%22Drobo%22&objID=f939&date Range=last90days&userID=&numResults=15&rankBy=10001

Some think it's great for storage, but may have some issues to consider for editing.

K

Yes I would also definitely recommend reading into the Drobo, I have also heard some pretty mixed opinions. Right now I am on a 8 port SAS box with the protection of RAID-5. We have had no problems what so ever and you can run either SATA or SAS drives, we are currently just running SATA.

I work in an educational institution and have the following kit:

Apple Xsan Server
Xsan Server
Intel MAc Pro FailOver server
Infortrend 15 TB disk array
QLogic 15 port Fibre switch
- Fibre Optic Channel duplex AV data transfer
Netgear 24 port ethernet switch
- Ethernet Meta data transfer
48 port patch bay
16 port fibre distribution interface

The whole lot was about £50k although we've been evolving this system for about 5 years. Add in all the ATTO cards, mac pro clients and Black Magic systems we have and it's about £120k. The great thing is I get to mess around with it all day!

It's rock solid and even 400 students can't manage to fill it up!

Hey did you find/determine a solution yet?

We're about to setup and also looking for a shared removable/upgradeable storage solution:

(*) to be shared between FinalCut and possibly Premiere boxes,
(*) to have removable storage so we can easily archive and upgrade as our needs grow

Something like Drobo or ReadyNAS?

Just not sure if Drobo could be shared between more than one computer over FireWire (doubtful) or if ReadyNAS is fast enough for video work (also not sure)?

Keep us posted!

no offense, but I wouldn't recommend drobos to anyone.

My drobos lock up my system, disappear (eject) for no apparent reason and take forever to move files. They are not as fast as advertised. They are not as reliable as advertised. Their technical support is horrifying bad. I sent a diagnostic to one of their people and got a response two weeks later. The response was the tech asking if I had emailed a diagnostic to him, and if I did, could i mail it to him again as he couldn't find it. I did and I never heard back from him.

An interesting side note... Before we got the drobos, I tried to get on their message boards to feel out the performance of the system. Turns out you can't see the message boards unless you are a registered user with a valid drobo serial number, meaning you can only get on if you already own one. Once you log on the forum, it's pretty clear why they don't allow non-owners on the site.

I actually got more advice and assistance from other users on the form than I did from any tech person from drobo.

I would try the Guardian MAX system. Ours work great.

One more thing you might want to add to your research list, is the MetaLAN/SAN range from Tiger Technology ( http://www.tiger-technology.com/), this is a software solution where you can add your own storage.

We currently use this alongside two terrablock systems, the advantage of the MetaSAN systems is they are File Level rather than the Volume level of the Terrablock, they are very scalable and if you don't have too many seats can function without a dedicated MetaData Controller.