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[park]

I currently run MC on my Sony Vaio laptop with my music all on one 120gb firewire connected drive. For various reasons (one being I also do video work and am running out of usb and firewire ports for external drives) I am thinking about building a raid 5 array in a seperate box and connecting it via a gigabit network pcmcia card to my laptop.

Anybody have any experience or advice about this before I attempt it? I am guessing that with it being a gigabit network I would be able to access and modify files at at least the same speed as using a directly connected usb2/firewire drive.

I seem to remember people reporting performance issues or long delays before files play etc. but I might be confusing this with people using servers to stream music to other computers.

Any feedback welcome,
Thanks
Bri

[jgourd]

You could build one like this guy did.

http://mini-itx.com/projects/fsrs/

[sonicbox]

A file system protocol running over Gigabit Ethernet will never outperform directly attached Firewire or SCSI storage. (Especially on non-optimal hardware.)  Of course, depending on your needs/uses... it may be fine for you.

[glynor]

I've a bit of experience with this stuff.  My job includes (among many other things) video editing using a NLE.  RAID is definately the way to go. 

First, off, at home for my media center storage system, I use a Promise RAID 5 card in a (Linux) PC that's connected to my network via Gigabit ethernet and have had no real issues.  Sometimes with large video files there is a bit of a delay before playback begins or ends, but it isn't long and doesn't apply to audio.  I did make very sure to use reliable network components (as opposed to the Marvell onboard Gigabit ports on my motherboards which I had lots of problems with).  I love the system, but I don't know that I'd recommend it to someone who doesn't have a lot of networking and hardware-building experience...  Plus, if you want to edit video, keep reading.

The stuff I'm using:

Intel Pro/1000 MT (Server) Gigabit Ethernet PCI Card (in the Linux server machine)
Intel Pro/1000 GT (Desktop) Gigabit Ethernet PCI Card (in other "client" machines)
Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 (non-M) with 128MB RAM installed (Kingston RAM)
4x Western Digital Caviar RE (Raid Edition) SATA 250GB Hard Drives (WD2500SD)
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe Motherboard, AMD Athlon XP-M 2500+ CPU, and OCZ DDR400 Memory, Antec Case and TruePower 450 Watt Power Supply

It works PERFECTLY.  But....

However, I'd really recommend that you take a look at this instead.  The WiebeTech RT5.  I have one of these at work that I use for all my video editing on my G5 with Final Cut Pro.  It was simple as hell to set up, includes 2x Firewire 800, 1xUSB2, and 1xSATA150 ports.  It's OS independant (just shows up as a FireWire drive or whatever) has space for 5 PATA drives (I'm using 5xWD2500SB with one in Hot Spare mode).  You can even connect it to more than one computer at a time, if you've got the right interfaces on your PC (you can use FireWire or USB on one machine and SATA on the other).  If you buy a bare system (with no drives) you can configure it however you want, and it's not too expensive (compared to building and maintaining a whole separate PC).  AND, it's got a handle!  It's quite heavy with 5 drives installed, but it is somewhat mobile (and you mentioned you use a laptop so I imagine this could come in handy).

Best of all, it's FAST.  If you plan to use it to encode video, or live-edit video using anything approaching a Pro solution, Gigabit ethernet won't be fast enough.  It'll drop frames when you're encoding, and slow down render and compression times.  It seems like it should be, but once you add in the network overhead, it really isn't the same as having a local drive.  In raw speed it's comparable, but Network latency (the time between when you request a file and when you start to receive a data stream) is HUGE compared to a local drive.

EDIT:  I forgot to mention, I have a Hawking Technology 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch.  It's a great little switch with a nice backplane that supports full speed on each port.

[park]

Thanks a lot Glynor. I'm so glad I asked. It's nice to have the benefit of experience eh. I will need to wait a while before i can part with that kind of cash (see how the next few months of work go), but I think the solution you recomended is a good one. I cant really be having the system drop frames, as I also record out to DV for my masters too.

Just wondering (i know this topic is wandering a bit now), but do you also edit HD on the laptop? How do you deal with the bandwidth (firewire2 or do you do a smaller frame size offline edit, or edit HDV, etc?)

Cheers,
bri

[glynor]

Unfortunately, no, the boss hasn't sprung for the HD Camera yet.   

(Actually, we're a non-profit though, so until it's really needed, we won't make that jump.  Money doesn't grow on trees they say...)

We run completely DV.  I have two Canon XLS-1's, a little Canon pro-sumer camcorder (which I use as a MiniDV deck), and two of these (which are really very nice).  I work for a research institution, and it's mostly scientific lectures, microscope video, and training videos.  We also do PR stuff every so often, but there just isn't the demand yet to go HD.

When it happens, I'll probably just replace those drives in the RT5 with a a bunch of 500-600GB Western Digital's and use FireWire800 (as my G5 workstation has plenty of those ports).  I probably wouldn't use my wimpy G4 laptop to do much with HD video, as it wouldn't handle it (though it is one of the new ones with FireWire800, the processor speed on the current crop of Apple laptops is pretty shabby).  Of course, by then, I should be able to get a smokin' Intel Pentium M PowerBook Mac Laptop, so we'll see....

Editing offline video always seemed too much of a pain (though again, I'm not using HD).  I'd rather "do it right the first time".  Plus, most of what we record never goes to tape.  We record directly to disk if we can help it at all.  Apple's FCP has a very easy way to delete all the unused footage once you're done with the edit, so it's pretty easy to clean up all the extra space.

It would all depend on the money I get to play with when/if that happens.  You never can tell what weird stuff they'll decide to fund (and essential stuff they decide not to).  It certainly would be nice to get an X-Serve RAID with dual Fibre Channel...