I'll see what I can find out but to be honest I would stick with Glyph especially with their warranty. They're really good about it and their stuff is reliable.
Opus

Angelo, the reason why Glyphs products are reliable is because they use reliable components.

The only thing special about the Glyph hard drives is that the hard disk mode pages have been tweaked for audio purposes.

If you have an ATTO SCSI HBA (PCI adapter) though, when you format your hard drive, you can choose to write mode pages appropriate for audio. So you don't need Glyph to do it for you. Anyways, the performance difference is not huge, so IMO Glyph products aren't worth their 200%-300% markup.

I'm not sure if you wrote it or not, but Glyph uses storcase products!

I'm trying to figure out a new hard disk setup for myself.

Here's what I'm thinking about:

One internal IBM Deskstar 7200 30GB drive for OS and all applications.

One or more internal IBM Deskstar 7200 30GB drives to be used as the sample library.

One or internal IBM Deskstar 7200 30GB drive to be used as a backup repository for OS and applications in case of OS disk failure.

RAID 0 across 2 or more Seagate Cheetah X15 drives. Each drive will be on a seperate bus of my ATTO UL3D SCSI HBA. Audio data will be actively written and read from these disks.

A removable disk chassis to copy all the data from the RAID to. Each song or set of songs will have their own removable disk. On that disk will be all the audio files, all the samples, and all the sequences. The sequences will also be stored on the OS hard drive.

I need to be able to copy the data to a removable drive when my disks get full.

The thing is though, I'd like my removable drive to be IDE so I don't have to pay lots of money for a new SCSI disk every time! I'm not sure that storcase has an external SCSI array that can write to IDE disks. Actually, I don't think it's possible.

I'm thinking about just using a firewire drive instead of a storcase drive. It would cost more money than an IDE disk and a little less perhaps than a SCSI disk per Gigabyte. I think you have a much :) larger budget than mine, but each storcase drive holder costs about $50 I think which could mean a lot of money over time.

I'm all about data redundancy with audio. I mean, this stuff is my life so I am fucking not going to be losing this data. I also back up all my files to an Ecrix VXA tape drive and put the tape in a two safes. One in my studio, one somewhere else.

What PCI RAID card do you have Ang? How much read/write speed do you need? More disk speed means more tracks.

Originally posted by Ang1970:
For use with ProTools Mix+ mac, 10k rpm drives, ATTO dual scsi... (same ones used by Glyph)
Any new developments with this hardware? Other manufacturers competing (making compatible chassis')?
I plan to put a couple new ones together soon, and need to brush up on the process. Anyone care to do a walkthrough?

Damn, I didn't answer your questions at all.

Lemme try again.

New Developments-

There's now 15,000 RPM drives by Seagate. They're 18GB and cost about $350 each.

Stay with Storcase, their shit is good.

There's an Ultra3/scsi160 ATTO card- the UL3D. Dual 160MB/sec thruput per bus!

Walkthrough-

What type of walkthrough are ya looking for? :)

Originally posted by Faeflora:
Damn, I didn't answer your questions at all.

LOL... That's fine, you gave a lot of good info that passers-by might benefit from. :)

For the walkthrough, I'd like to make a sort of checklist for myself. All the little things that you have to remember in order to make the process painless.

For instance, the scsi repeater board... what is the consensus on this item? Neccesity or noise for the scsi chain? I noticed a few people were thrown off when Kingston recently changed the part number on the removable chassis. Any other little idiosynchracies (sp?) people should watch for?

Part numbers, dip switches, compatibility... the usual. I was up on it last year, but it's been so long since I researched it I'm afraid everything's different now.

Thanks for your help! :)

Make sure to upgrade all firmware to the most recent version.

If you are using SCSI LVD then you don't need a repeater unless you are running over 25 feet.

Sorry, that 25 feet is not right. That's IF you are using LVD twisted pair.

Now I'm confused...

I should get the repeater cards if I'm using LVD twisted pair? Seems like it should be the other way round? I'm lost. :(

Argh, sorry. Here is the correct information:

If you are UNDER 10 FEET, SCSI LVD normal cabling works fine.

If you are going OVER 10 FEET and UP TO 25 FEET, SCSI LVD twisted pair is a must. You could probably go further without problems.

If you need to go much further than 25 feet ie. 50 feet then perhaps you should consider Fibre Channel.

Ok, I am spamming this thread majorly. I hope I'm contributing some usefull information.

My advice on the disks to buy:

Cheetah X15 15,000 RPM drives. Only 18GB but you'll get more tracks.

Here's my advice on the Storcase Products:

If you want a two bay unit, order a:

DS320 (Data Silo)

This holds two Ultra160 drives. It also has connections for two SCSI buses.

If you want a four bay unit, order a:

DS-351

There's a lot of options for this product. If you want screaming 100+ MB/second thruput for your system then you can this you can stripe RAID 0 across all four drives. It would be just like the Medea AudioRAID and simmilar products. Really fucking fast with lots and lots of tracks on playback and record.

As I wrote before I'm putting together something like this for myself. If you want to talk about this, I think I'd be able to communicate what I'm trying to say much more eloquently. :) 410-908-0998

Oh and Glyph uses Storcase.

Excellent. Thanks! :)

Ok, so I guess it's not as complicated as I was making myself believe.

I might give you a call, but I'd still like to post whatever we talk about here. I'm sure I'm not the only one with these questions.