multi-terabyte hard disk systems ?

will-3 wrote on 10/3/2008, 11:12 AM
We have a number of 500 Gb and 1-terabyte hard disk all connected to our system by usb 2.0. This is an odd collection of whatever we could buy on sale when we needed it. Not very professional looking and not very organized.

1 - What are some standard systems for making multi-terabytes of video or data available on the system?

2 - What do large data centers use then they have very large disk array's live on the system?

3 - What are the options (faster maybe) to firewire or usb connections?

We want to buy the hardware / software needed to do this properly and in a professional manor.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Comments

Stringer wrote on 10/3/2008, 1:57 PM
Large data centers use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storage_area_networkStorage Area Networks[/link] set up by companies like IBM, Dell or HP to name a few ..
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/network/IBM Network Attached Storage[/link]


There are probably local IT providers who could do it also ..

SCSI RAID arrays are preferred for speed, but if you are going keep your current drive hardware it would depend on your current interface ..

Either IDE or SATA RAID, or JBOD ( just a bunch of disks ) would be faster than USB or firewire...
farss wrote on 10/3/2008, 4:22 PM
If you only want to connect a large disk array to one system eSATA is fast and cheap. You get 3GB/s data rate and you can buy a box to house say 5 or 10 drives that provides an eSATA connection to your PC.
If you want multiple PCs to connect to the disk array then Fibrechannel is what you need. Rather expensive technology as the licencing fees for software are over the top.

The highest performance disks are 2.5", you can get ones that spin at 15,000 RPM. They're not that expensive but they're not that big so you end up needing a lot of them, then it gets expensive!

What you need for serving out video is somewhat different to what's used in datacentres. You need small numbers of large data streams compared to large numbers of small data streams.

For the kinds of video most here need to deal with gigabit ethernet is plenty good enough and very cheap. The trick is to use the right components. Better yet, speak to people who specialise in this. I can't speak highly enough of one local company XDT.

Bob.