Digital Video - February 2008 - (Page 25) DULCE PRO PQ IN REVIEW THE SWEET SPOT DULCE SYSTEMS OFFERS A SOLID STORAGE-SOLUTION WINNER. BY NED SOLTZ I n the December 2007 issue of DV, I wrote about “rolling my own” RAID and the underlying technologies which continue to make massively fast storage solutions more and more affordable to even more editors. But, a little follow-up serves as a reason why purchasing a turnkey solution may far outweigh any monetary savings attained by building your own RAID. My original RAID consisting of two MacGurus Burley Boxes, with each populated with four Hitachi 250-gig drives with a Silicon Image 3726-based port multiplier and managed by SoftRaid for Mac, has been running strong. Even when I broke the data connector of one of the Hitachi drives when installing the port multiplier, I was able to Top: The Pro DQ. Above the GUI drive info patch the drive with a piece of the is clearly detailed. broken plastic cover. My five-drive RAID populated with Seagate AWARD OF spare” under my RAID 10 configuration. On at least 750-gig drives has not three separate occasions, been quite so trouble-free. About six weeks after EXCELLENCE that hot spare has gone offline, requiring removing building the drive and comand reinserting the drive. I continue pleting my article, the Silicon Image to use that drive as a hot spare. But software did its job and e-mailed me it tells me that my enclosure obvithat my RAID was rebuilding ously is intermittent and therefore because of a failure of drive 1 not totally dependable. But what do (which actually is the second drive in I do when I bought the enclosure the box since for some reason the from a Web site box pusher and my software numbers the drives 0 to 4). drives one at a time when the local Before replacing what I thought to megachain electronics store was be the offending drive, I popped it selling loss-leader Seagate drives? from the removable enclosure, reinI’ll tell you what can be done: serted it and the drive mounted. I Turn to a vendor who offers a RAID repeated the action several times. with support, a warranty, drives Using the Silicon Image software, I from matched lot numbers and designated the drive as the “hot DV hardware/software customized by a company who understands the difference between storing word processing files and video. Dulce Systems stands out as a shining example of such a company. Founded by several storage industry professionals who have moved together between companies for the almost 20 years, the Dulce produces a full line of FireWire, eSATA, and direct PCI storage solutions for everything from DV to 2K editing. I have had the opportunity to use Dulce’s top-of-the-line product, the Pro DQ, for several months and put it through its paces. While I did not experience any failures whatsoever during that timeframe, it was definitely reassuring to know that I had a vendor standing behind the product and as well to know that Dulce offers a 42-month warranty on this system — longer than anyone else in the industry. The Pro DQ enclosure hosts eight eSATA drives for a maximum of 8TB unformatted in RAID 0 configuration. Where it differs from my homebrew RAID (or even from less costly devices from Dulce and other vendors) is that it interfaces to the PC or Mac via a direct PCIe or PCIx controller card. The controller card itself is a small computing device with an Intel IOP341 800Mhz processor, 1MB SRAM and an internal bus speed of 6.4GB/s. In other words, the card is operating at the speed of the bus rather than being slowed down by a conversion from the bus to an eSATA bridge card. The chipset on the card and the drive backplane supports JBOD, RAID 0, 1, 3, 5 and 6. Dulce ships the Pro PQ configured as RAID 5. They contend that this is the optimal redundancy for digital video to maintain both an extremely fast data rate as well as the least possible loss of useable space. Note that in a RAID 5 configuration, the RAID maintains parity dv february 2008 www.dv.com 25 http://www.dv.com
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