Digital Video - May 2008 - (Page 18)

IN REVIEW 3WARE SIDECAR PRETTY ON THE INSIDE THE SIDECAR RAID WON’T WIN ANY BEAUTY CONTESTS, BUT IT’S GORGEOUS WHERE IT COUNTS. BY NED SOLTZ T he 3ware Sidecar is a funny-looking box. But its performance, sturdy construction, data security and versatility are no joke. The Sidecar is a bare enclosure that holds four SATA I or II drives with advertised capacities up to 750GB per drive bay. 3ware has assured me that 1TB drives will work in the enclosure. It includes a dedicated PCIe card for use in any PowerMac G5, MacPro or PC system with PCI express bus. Drivers are available for Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, Linux, FreeBSD, Windows XP and Windows Vista. Administration of the RAID is via a browser-based interface. It supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. And at a price of $895 for enclosure and card, it brings high-performance storage and redundancy to the desktop at a very reasonable cost. Add your own drives from your favorite vendor, and it is possible to configure a 3TB (4x750GB) hardware RAID for around $1,500. That’s amazing! There are advantages to buying a preconfigured system from a vendor. Drives will come installed and the RAID will be created. Users merely need to install the card and the drivers. The RAID will then mount and you are ready to go. The Sidecar does require a bit more technical acumen, but configuration is straightforward and the documentation for all platforms is clear. Open the drive bay latch, remove the carrier and attach the drive to the carrier with a screwdriver. Securely latch the drives in the enclosure. Install the card and then install the driver for the host platform. Connect the card and enclosure with the locking secure mini-SAS cable (no more eSATA cables easily pulled out when the cat gets into the computer wires). Attach an included DIN8 cable between card and enclosure. This cable transmits monitoring data to and from the unit. Follow the directions to initialize drives and then configure them via the configuration utility. The software utility controls everything about your RAID. Most users these days are tending toward RAID 5, which combines striping across drives with parity providing an excellent combination of speed and redundancy. It is possible to configure all four drives into a RAID or three drives plus an empty drive as a “hot spare.” It is this latter method that, while reducing overall capacity, is the most secure policy and is my recommendation. A degraded RAID can be rebuilt by replacing the defective drive but there still SCORE 3WARE SIDECAR PROS: Sturdy construction. Fast dedicated hardware-implemented RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD. Excellent software. CONS: Only fourdrive unit available. Lack of expansion beyond four drives. BOTTOM LINE: Consider it as you upgrade your existing system or design a new one. MSRP: $895 (including empty enclosure, interface card, mini-SAS connector, DIN8 cable) CONTACT: www.3ware.com 18 dv may 2008 is a chance for some data loss. The hot spare allows for the failure of one drive in the RAID 5 array and a rebuilding of the RAID immediately to the empty drive. The software can be set to rebuild automatically, rebuild manually and to notify an administrator via e-mail of a RAID failure. The software also includes ability to administer the RAID remotely. I attempted to test this feature but could not get it to work. Documentation was a bit sketchy on this topic. Now, a few words about the controller card. 3ware is a manufacturer of dedicated eSATA, SAS and PCI RAID cards. Sidecar is not, then, a product from a startup but rather a product from an established designer and manufacturer of RAID solutions which has chosen to bring an affordable alternative to users. The company has designed its own card with its own chipsets and have opted to use a PowerPC processor as the heart of the card. The card itself contains 128MB of memory and employs a proprietary architecture that 3ware calls “StorSwitch” to ensure data flow. There is an optional battery backup for the card that can cache data up to 72 hours in the event of a power loss. I tested the system in a MacPro 8-core dual 3.2 monster with 14GB of RAM and running Mac OS X 10.5.2. The Leopard driver was available on the 3ware Web site and installed without a hitch. My test unit came with four Western Digital 10,000 rpm 150GB raptor drives. Thus, I www.dv.com http://www.3ware.com http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - May 2008

Digital Video - May 2008 Contents DV Update Close-Up AJ-HPX3000 Camcorder Sidecar Raid Zoom H2 Recorder Instant Expert 324 Flat-Panel Display Extreme 35MM Adapter Type-S JIB How Slow Can You Go? Global Gastronome Mixing It UP Long-Distance Runaround Tools & Technology DV 101 Production Diary

Digital Video - May 2008

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