Fastest Portable External Storage - Raid0 ?

T

tradbourne

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We currently have the following structure for our Win 7 photo editing workstations.

OS: SSD or Raptor
Data: Internal Raid0 via W7 dynamic disk (2-4TB)
Backup: Hourly backups to slow but reliable unRaid NAS (since the Raid0 is likely to fail at some point.)

We want to find the fastest external version of this. Somebody wants to take their work home each day, and an external USB drive is flexible, but way too slow for saving gigibyte sized photoshop files. What kind of portable external drive options do you recommend for speed throughput with a 2TB minimum size.
 
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External SSD ?

They also make the eSata drive docks you can stick SSD in and move them from home to work too...
 
They have R0 firewire, esata enclosures.

I would say an SSD over USB3.0 or ESATA would be a great bet, because SSD's tolerate jostling, drops, etc better than mechanical hard drive. They are spendy for the capacity.

How much capacity do you need to move back and forth?

You should also work on your backup solution.. Are you using gigabit ethernet to back up?
 
Two options:

SSD over eSATA/USB 3.0. You can just buy a regular SSD and buy a USB 3.0 external enclosure. Pretty much any will do.

USB 3.0 Memory Stick. I have a 32GB Patriot that does 70MB/s write.

I also shoot Gigapixel photos, so I happen to have both. I also have a 2.5" 1TB HDD 7200RPM that does 110MB/s, as a back-up.
 
ToddW2 said:
External SSD ?

They also make the eSata drive docks you can stick SSD in and move them from home to work too...
Click to expand...

We are presently sticking with rotating media as 2-4TB of SSD gets pricey. Raid0 helps the rotating media read and write faster.

So eSata is the best way to go for speed? I suppose a 2 bay 2.5" enclosure would be tiny and portable.
 
hotcrandel said:
They have R0 firewire, esata enclosures.

I would say an SSD over USB3.0 or ESATA would be a great bet, because SSD's tolerate jostling, drops, etc better than mechanical hard drive. They are spendy for the capacity.

How much capacity do you need to move back and forth?

You should also work on your backup solution.. Are you using gigabit ethernet to back up?
Click to expand...

We need 2TB minimum in the portable solution. This is enough for 6 months of data, and the rest is archived on the NAS. (we have capacity for 100TB there)

The 2TB requirement is why we are using rotating media rather than SSD. (fast enough when in Raid0 but still affordable)
 
eSata Enclosure + Drives + Power Cable

Not exactly what most here consider portable... :D


Be careful moving those disks to and from work and banging them around.

I've had terrible luck with portable spinning drives they always seem to die, slow down, or have random problems.
 
Trackr said:
Two options:

SSD over eSATA/USB 3.0. You can just buy a regular SSD and buy a USB 3.0 external enclosure. Pretty much any will do.

USB 3.0 Memory Stick. I have a 32GB Patriot that does 70MB/s write.

I also shoot Gigapixel photos, so I happen to have both. I also have a 2.5" 1TB HDD 7200RPM that does 110MB/s, as a back-up.
Click to expand...

I really like the speed that I get with Raid0 today. 200+ MB/s read and write. Will USB 3 be that fast? That speed an 2TB capacity in a portable package are the requirements.
 
ToddW2 said:
eSata Enclosure + Drives + Power Cable

Not exactly what most here consider portable... :D

Be careful moving those disks to and from work and banging them around.

I've had terrible luck with portable spinning drives they always seem to die, slow down, or have random problems.
Click to expand...

A 2 bay 2.5 enclosure would be fine, if you left cables behind. Even 3.5" could work, but 2.5 is preferable.

Reliability is an issue, but while here, the drives are always being backed up. Only an issue while they are off-site for a few hours.
 
hotcrandel said:
You should also work on your backup solution.. Are you using gigabit ethernet to back up?
Click to expand...

The backup solution is unRaid over gigabit ethernet. 100 mb/sec is all you can do at present, but fast enough. I call that slow, because raid0 locally is over twice that fast.

It really gives us the best cost/performance. Unreliable 2-4TB raid0 being continually backed up in the background to very reliable 100TB unRaid. We have 6 workstations feeding the one unRaid server.
 
If your a cutting edge shop and have a MAC to facilitate the transfer using Thunderbolt you could check out the Drobo Mini :) Or even a Drobo 5D.

Wait you said Win 7, so either of these would work since the Mini also supports USB 3.0.

Pretty slick devices these guys make.

You need a hefty budget to play with these devices though.
 
tradbourne said:
OS: SSD or Raptor
Data: Internal Raid0 via W7 dynamic disk (2-4TB)
Backup: Hourly backups to slow but reliable unRaid NAS (since the Raid0 is likely to fail at some point.)

We want to find the fastest external version of this. Somebody wants to take their work home each day, and an external USB drive is flexible, but way too slow for saving gigibyte sized photoshop files. What kind of portable external drive options do you recommend for speed throughput?
Click to expand...

You don't need 2TB hard drives to handle gigibyte sized files.

You have 2 issues here. One is having enough space on the hard drive. The other is getting the data onto the hard drive in a timely fashion.

You really need to get a better grasp on the amount of space you need. The speed stuff is easy. ESATA or USB3 transfer about 2GB a minute. That seems to put a 30-40GB limit on projects to take home.

----

If I were doing it, I would get hotswap bays for both the work and home computer and a 2-1/2" 1TB hard drive to move back and forth. Use the box the drive is shipped in to move it back and forth. If I needed a faster drive, I would get a 240GB SSD.

But a properly sized USB3 stick is a better solution.
 
GeorgeHR said:
If I were doing it, I would get hotswap bays for both the work and home computer and a 2-1/2" 1TB hard drive to move back and forth. Use the box the drive is shipped in to move it back and forth. If I needed a faster drive, I would get a 240GB SSD.
Click to expand...

A typical day will add 10gig to the externals, and we are working on several months worth at a time, so 2TB is a comfortable size. Would love a 2TB SSD, but it would be pricey.

A 2 bay 2.5 eSata enclosure sounds ideal, but not easy to find. Maybe this one?

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/GM8QM5S20T16/
 
Super Talent RC8 flash drive. Done. If someone is taking home work every day, 50GB should be enough.
 
You might look into Drobo. Seems like it would be a great fit for what you're looking at, both in terms of transfer speed and capacity.
 
phreakpiercer said:
You might look into Drobo. Seems like it would be a great fit for what you're looking at, both in terms of transfer speed and capacity.
Click to expand...

I see my Drobo being my 100TB unRaid that provides fault tolerant storage. Too heavy to move..

What I need is fast portable storage in 2TB size. Approx 200 mb/sec or faster read and write.
 
crazjayz said:
Super Talent RC8 flash drive. Done. If someone is taking home work every day, 50GB should be enough.
Click to expand...

Wow those are fast. Still we need to be able to hold a number of months of photo shoots and 2 TB is comfortable. We used to only have 1TB and it was too small. We need to be able to access our current workflow without having to copy it back from the archived unRaid server.
 
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tradbourne said:
What I need is fast portable storage in 2TB size. Approx 200 mb/sec or faster read and write.
Click to expand...

Speed - Portability - Cost

Pick 2. Sacrifice 1.

Speed & Portability will result in a dual SSD setup
Portability & Cost will result in a single 2TB HDD.
Speed & Cost will result in RAID0 HDDs.

Just thinking outside the box, how about a SSD + HDD setup with software based backup. Pretty much you copy your files to a 120GB SSD, and then in your downtime, you have some software move it up to the HDD, thus freeing up the SSD again. This doesn't work though if you need to work on all 2TB at one time, or non-chronologically.
 
crazjayz said:
This doesn't work though if you need to work on all 2TB at one time, or non-chronologically.
Click to expand...
I liked your solution. I liked mine. I liked all of the solutions.

The problem is this insistance on 2TB of data. It is a completely unreasonable amount of data to work on overnight on a regular basis.

---

I don't do a lot of video work. Nero. Cutting commercials out of TV recordings. Is about my limit.

Using a SSD for the data and an I7-3770 I would have a hard time processing more than a few hours of video in an evening. Way short of 2TB.
 
GeorgeHR said:
I liked your solution. I liked mine. I liked all of the solutions.

The problem is this insistance on 2TB of data. It is a completely unreasonable amount of data to work on overnight on a regular basis.
---
I don't do a lot of video work. Nero. Cutting commercials out of TV recordings. Is about my limit.

Using a SSD for the data and an I7-3770 I would have a hard time processing more than a few hours of video in an evening. Way short of 2TB.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the 2TB is the issue here. If the work is really mission critical, then tradbourne needs to bite the bullet and go multi-SSD since that's the only simple, reliable, solution. Cost be damned.

Regarding file size, I know one of my friend's dad does stuff with movie posters, and those can reach the multi-gig file size pretty fast.
 
GeorgeHR said:
I liked your solution. I liked mine. I liked all of the solutions.

The problem is this insistance on 2TB of data. It is a completely unreasonable amount of data to work on overnight on a regular basis.

Using a SSD for the data and an I7-3770 I would have a hard time processing more than a few hours of video in an evening. Way short of 2TB.
Click to expand...

If this was for me, I would go with the Super Talent flash drive. I can manage the small size. The staff using this on a regular basis, are not computer friendly, and since this is a workflow requirement,all the images would flow onto this system, and would be edited off this system, and we have found 1TB to be very confining. We simply can't hold our current workflow without going back and forth to archive. We wouldn't be simply copying on tonight's work. We would use this as the only data store, with older data archived off.

This is the only item I've found that matches my requirements so far. Nobody likes it??

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/GM8QM5S20T16/
 
crazjayz said:
Speed & Cost will result in RAID0 HDDs.

Just thinking outside the box, how about a SSD + HDD setup with software based backup. Pretty much you copy your files to a 120GB SSD, and then in your downtime, you have some software move it up to the HDD, thus freeing up the SSD again. This doesn't work though if you need to work on all 2TB at one time, or non-chronologically.
Click to expand...

Love the idea of pairing a small fast SSD with a 3TB Green HD. This would be the ultimate. We would never need more than 10-20 gigabytes at one time, but we would be accessing it non-chronologically. We just need software that manages the movement of the data from SSD to the green HD. From the user's point of view, it should just look like a 3TB HD.

This is what the Seagate Momentus Laptop drive is made of. A SSD built in to a HD. We just need somebody to put the Momentus concept into a 3.5 3TB drive.
 
If Cost is no obstacle then here is a possible solution.

Get the Drobo Mini for approximately - $650

Get 4 500GB SSD's for around $500-600 or more per drive.

Run these in Raid zero.

You'll accomplish these marks:
1) Portability.
2) Speed, the Raid of 4 SSD's in the mini will be amazing.
3) Reliability, protection from being dropped. No platters to worry about, or heads touching platters.

You are still limited by the USB 3.0 interface, but the Drobo Mini has a Thunderbolt interface as well.

You can get Thunderbolt PCIe cards for Windows PC's so that could also be an option and would potentially eliminate the bottleneck of USB 3.0.

USB 3.0 should be very decent though for transferring the files.

I am also surprised your not using a MAC platform for the tasks at hand, although the bridge gap on which is better for this is less and less all the time.
 
tradbourne said:
If this was for me, I would go with the Super Talent flash drive. I can manage the small size. The staff using this on a regular basis, are not computer friendly, and since this is a workflow requirement,all the images would flow onto this system, and would be edited off this system, and we have found 1TB to be very confining. We simply can't hold our current workflow without going back and forth to archive. We wouldn't be simply copying on tonight's work. We would use this as the only data store, with older data archived off.

This is the only item I've found that matches my requirements so far. Nobody likes it??

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/GM8QM5S20T16/
Click to expand...

Regarding that item, I'm going to hazard a guess that it's going to be slow as shit when compared to SSD. 5400 rpm drives in RAID0 will probably net around 125-150MB/s.

tradbourne said:
Love the idea of pairing a small fast SSD with a 3TB Green HD. This would be the ultimate. We would never need more than 10-20 gigabytes at one time, but we would be accessing it non-chronologically. We just need software that manages the movement of the data from SSD to the green HD. From the user's point of view, it should just look like a 3TB HD.

This is what the Seagate Momentus Laptop drive is made of. A SSD built in to a HD. We just need somebody to put the Momentus concept into a 3.5 3TB drive.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the issue with the data is that it's non-chronological. That means you can't just move a folder to the SSD from the HDD in the morning (wait 15 min) and work on it all day. You'll be transferring stuff back and forth throughout the day, thus, you might as well just have a single 2TB HDD. Either that or pony up and get a 512GB SSD (~$500) which should last what it seems like may be a week. Backup every week?

I think we need to know a couple things about the data:
- file sizes
- total number of files (total data needed)
- time frame required (ie: files/day, size/day)
- how much is non-chronological (ie: do you need something that's 1 week old, or 2 months old?)

sawk said:
If Cost is no obstacle then here is a possible solution.

Get the Drobo Mini for approximately - $650

Get 4 500GB SSD's for around $500-600 or more per drive.

Run these in Raid zero.

You'll accomplish these marks:
1) Portability.
2) Speed, the Raid of 4 SSD's in the mini will be amazing.
3) Reliability, protection from being dropped. No platters to worry about, or heads touching platters.

You are still limited by the USB 3.0 interface, but the Drobo Mini has a Thunderbolt interface as well.

You can get Thunderbolt PCIe cards for Windows PC's so that could also be an option and would potentially eliminate the bottleneck of USB 3.0.

USB 3.0 should be very decent though for transferring the files.

I am also surprised your not using a MAC platform for the tasks at hand, although the bridge gap on which is better for this is less and less all the time.
Click to expand...

WINNARRRR!!!! I didn't even know Drobo made something like that.
 
sawk said:
If Cost is no obstacle then here is a possible solution. Get the Drobo Mini for approximately - $650

I am also surprised your not using a MAC platform for the tasks at hand, although the bridge gap on which is better for this is less and less all the time.
Click to expand...

Sorry, but cost is always an obstacle. This is why we are running Windows for this work. Just try and price half dozen high end MAC computers. The Drobo mini is interesting, but more expensive. Will see where I can get thunderbolt PCIe cards.
 
tradbourne said:
The staff using this on a regular basis, are not computer friendly, and since this is a workflow requirement,all the images would flow onto this system, and would be edited off this system, and we have found 1TB to be very confining. We simply can't hold our current workflow without going back and forth to archive. We wouldn't be simply copying on tonight's work. We would use this as the only data store, with older data archived off.
Click to expand...

Your best option is to use a standard 2TB hard drive, hot swap drive bays, and the box the drive was shipped in.

For $200 you get to see if it works good enough for your users.
 
crazjayz said:
Regarding that item, I'm going to hazard a guess that it's going to be slow as shit when compared to SSD. 5400 rpm drives in RAID0 will probably net around 125-150MB/s.
Click to expand...

Found a couple of reviews out there, but trust you guys to shred the reviews. First one is being stripped out by the forum software to (the ssd review dot com)

http://.com/raid-enterprise/newer-technology-guardian-maximus-mini-portable-raid-review/4/

http://www.storagereview.com/newer_technology_guardian_maximus_mini_review

Like the price, and much more portable than the Drobo mini. Also the requirement for Thunderbolt makes the Drobo even more pricey. Maybe this little guy is good enough??
 
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Of course cost is always a concern, This merely the fastest most portable solution you can probably currently find.

1TB 2.5" drives are as low as $240, so it could still be an option with these drives costing half as much as SSD's.

Approximately $3,000 to go the SSD option.
Approximately $1600 to go with Non-SSD 1TB Hard drives for twice the capacity.

Right now the Thunderbolt option may require you to upgrade the motherboard of your Workstation.

Both Asus and Asrock announced PCIe product last summer but so far nothing has materialized.

A Motherboard upgrade would likely cost around $150, may be more/less depending what other features or how high end of a motherboard you need.
 
tradbourne said:
Found a couple of reviews out there, but trust you guys to shred the reviews.

http://.com/raid-enterprise/newer-technology-guardian-maximus-mini-portable-raid-review/4/

http://www.storagereview.com/newer_technology_guardian_maximus_mini_review

Like the price, and much more portable than the Drobo mini. Also the requirement for Thunderbolt makes the Drobo even more pricey. Maybe this little guy is good enough??
Click to expand...

That second link may do the trick. Nice and Portable and much cheaper than the Drobo Mini option.
 
tradbourne said:
Found a couple of reviews out there, but trust you guys to shred the reviews.

http://.com/raid-enterprise/newer-technology-guardian-maximus-mini-portable-raid-review/4/

http://www.storagereview.com/newer_technology_guardian_maximus_mini_review

Like the price, and much more portable than the Drobo mini. Also the requirement for Thunderbolt makes the Drobo even more pricey. Maybe this little guy is good enough??
Click to expand...

You first link isn't working. The storagereview seems to be pretty solid. I didn't expect 213MB/s for read & write for RAID0 from a 7200rpm drive. Keep in mind, your link to the etailer shows a 5400rpm drive, so expect slower speed of around 130-150MB/s is my guess.

Secondly, for the drobo, you don't need thunderbolt. It's usb 3.0 compatible. Furthermore, you don't want to be the first guy tested thunderbolt on PC since it's not officially supported by Drobo.

NOTE: Thunderbolt is currently supported only on Mac OS X.
Click to expand...
 
crazjayz said:
You first link isn't working. The storagereview seems to be pretty solid. I didn't expect 213MB/s for read & write for RAID0 from a 7200rpm drive. Keep in mind, your link to the etailer shows a 5400rpm drive, so expect slower speed of around 130-150MB/s is my guess.

Secondly, for the drobo, you don't need thunderbolt. It's usb 3.0 compatible. Furthermore, you don't want to be the first guy tested thunderbolt on PC since it's not officially supported by Drobo.
Click to expand...

Sorry about the first link. It keeps stripping out (the ssd review dot com) Tried to fix it but stripped again.

http://.com/raid-enterprise/newer-technology-guardian-maximus-mini-portable-raid-review/5/
 
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It seems that you found the best solution to your problem. I would go with this and two of these. Less that $600 per user and +200MB/s read/write in a relatively small package.
 
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