45Drives

Check out how the largest live-streaming platform uses a Storinator for their data storage needs! http://www.45drives.com/community/user-spotlights/livestream/

Sorry about that! We are gonna post it the storage section and check the rules before posting in the news forum next time!

Check out how the largest live-streaming platform uses a Storinator for their data storage needs! http://www.45drives.com/community/user-spotlights/livestream/

@tt2468 Definitely agree, SSDs are inherently faster than HDDs. However, large disk count solutions can indeed saturate multiple 10GbE NICs. We have tested our Storinator S45, fully loaded with 45 HDDs, saturating 3 of them. This might be good to show for our next blog, perhaps.

@leadeater Agree with this statement wholeheartedly, but Object storage is not for everyone quite yet. The free and open source packages like Ceph are not the simplest to implement, and other streamlined offerings are expensive. But I do agree object storage is a much better way to store data, especially in large quantities. Erasure coding significantly reduces the number of physical servers needed to protect the data which is very nice on the wallet and the environment. A nice middle-ground is you could use a clustering file-system like Gluster, BeeGFS or others so you can scale out your servers beyond one pod. This way, you can grow (rather than replace) your storage solution or use replication for data protection.

Hey Guys, We posted our blog on here yesterday for discussion of our latest article "How to Tune a NAS for Direct-from-Server Editing of 5K Video". You can check out the blog here if you haven't already: http://45drives.blogspot.ca/2016/05/how-to-tune-nas-for-direct-from-server.html (thanks everyone for their feedback, too!) We also wanted to post this video of our first of many user spotlights featuring video production studios as we help them tackle the pain of video production storage. Feel free to check out the video here: We have worked with @LinusTech over the last couple years assisting with his media storage pains and we wanted to feature some more. With that being said, there are some video production professionals on here that we would love to hear from. A). What do you guys think is the biggest pain of media/post production storage today? B). Where do you think the solution is? Or, how have you solved it in the past? Would love to hear from you. Thanks,

45 Drives R&D Engineer Brett Kelly has just released a blog on how to tune your video production NAS to achieve saturation speeds on a 10GbE line. With examples on tuning for Mac OSX clients and Windows clients, the blog concludes that having massive storage and high throughput in a centralized NAS can offer huge benefits to Video Editing studios. We would love for you to read the blog and then discuss with any comments or questions that you may have. Check out the blog here: http://45drives.blogspot.ca/2016/05/how-to-tune-nas-for-direct-from-server.html Thanks,

When choosing a RAID configuration for your mass storage device, which combination of speed, safety and space optimizations will enable you to achieve your objectives? In our latest blog post, 45 Drives R&D engineer Brett Kelly explores the options. ---- A common question we get asked here at 45 Drives is, “What RAID should I use with my Storinator?” Our answer: “What are you trying to do?” Choosing which RAID level is right for your application requires some thought into what is most important for your storage solution. Is it performance, redundancy or storage efficiency? In other words, do you need speed, safety or the most space possible? This post will briefly describe common configurations and how each can meet the criteria mentioned above. Please note I will discuss RAID levels as they are defined by Linux software RAID “mdadm”. For other implementations, such ZFS RAID, the majority of this post will hold true; however, there are some differences when you dig into the details. These will be addressed in a post to come! http://45drives.blogspot.ca/2015/11/how-to-decide-on-best-raid_11.html

Our pleasure! You might want to check out our template generator in the common enclosure styles (u-shape, l-shape, rackmount, etc) - that can get you started in your chosen CAD format a bit quicker. Forgot to mention as well - we do offer design services (where our design team can produce a CAD design based on your sketch/images/components you want included) for a fee. But given that you want to keep costs low, it's probably not your best bet.

All good! It's a bit confusing - we were one and the same for awhile in terms of pod design, when we first started 45 Drives a few years ago. However, over the past year especially, through R&D development and a lot of feedback from our customers, we've tweaked the design and its components from the original Backblaze design (more info on that here if you're curious). Now we find the performance is not only more reliable, but also able to withstand really data-heavy applications. Thanks for checking out the links!

One more thing I forgot to mention before - if you want to hear from a 45 Drives customer that's using Storinators for video post-production, let me know. We have a few that would be happy to give a referral, including one based out of North Carolina that does reality TV productions and commercial contracts.

Thanks for checking out the Storinator! Based on the info you supplied, it sounds like it would be an excellent fit for your needs. As you probably know, we offer FreeNAS, as well as Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and Rockstor (we have quite a few customers running Windows as well). FreeNAS is extremely popular with good reason - it's established and works really well. Re: hard drives, we don't recommend Western Digital green (more info here on our wiki). Scottyseng recommended WD Re drives - we'd echo this recommendation (in fact, Brett from our R&D team did some power-draw testing using them in a blog post, which you can read here). We offer both the 4TB and 6TB model, with a five-year warranty. If you have any additional questions about the XL60, or the set-up we'd recommend for you, just let me know here, or send a DM with your contact info.

Hi Scotty, Wanted to chime in here on a few points that you brought up to clarify: Vibration - Seagate studied our pod for vibration, and we scored the highest rating possible. You can read the full report here. Thermal properties - It's a pretty big misconception that our pods get exceptionally hot and lack proper cooling. You can check out the full thermal analysis we've done here. Replacing drives - We've made it easier than ever to replace drives by making our chassis lid tool-less. So now you can slide the pod from the rack, remove the top cover and vibration dampening covers with no tools required. Drives can be hot-swapped and any degraded array can be rebuilt without shutting down the unit. Archival storage versus live full-load storage - While the Storinator is kick-ass for archival storage, it performs excellently for live, data-intensive applications (especially when enterprise-class drives are used). With 100TB of usable space of 6TB drives in a RAID 10 (34 drives in total), Nimrod859 would have excellent speeds that exceed far more than archival storage. We have information on our wiki that describes raid levels and tested speeds. Feel free to take a look at our graphs for a full breakdown on achievable speeds. PSUs - Our PSU is a server-grade 950W redundant 2+1 Supply that has 1500W of active power on startup. Our product team has gotten lots of positive feedback on this from our customers' deployments in the field. HBA - Rocket 750 is standard on Storinators, but the LSI is available (and popular) with customers as well. We appreciate any and all feedback that we receive from the community. So if you have any questions for our product team or R&D folks, let me know.

Here's what Brett on our R&D team confirmed: "You can add more capacity in FreeNAS but you technically can't add more disks to the pool you have to add VDEVs. Depending on your initial pool configuration, if you made a 42 disk RAIDZ2 (1VDEV of 42 disks) to add more capacity to this pool, your new VDEV has to be the same size, therefore you would need to add 42 more disks, resulting in 2 VDEVs of 42 disks for a total of a 84 disk RAIDZ2. However, if you arranged your drives so you had multiple smaller VDEVs, it would much easier to add more disks into the system. For example, instead of the 1 VDEV of 42 disks mentioned above, you have 6 VDEVs of 7 drives. Same amount of disks, just a different config, however this allows you to only have to add 7 more drives to extend your pool rather than 42 like the example above. In the case of a 20-disk RAID 10 (stripe of mirrors) you have 10VDEVS of 2 disks. Therefore to add more drives you only need to add them in groups of 2. The trick with adding space to your FreeNAS pool is to plan ahead. If you know you want add more disks down the road, arrange your pool in such a way you can add the proper amount space with ease." Brett also weighed on the option to add additional drives after the fact on Rockstor, another NAS OS we offer: "Btrfs RAID has the ability to add drives in on the fly and btrfs will even the distribution of data across the volume as disks are added dynamically. You do not need to follow the same limitations of FreeNAS and ZFS." Let me know if you have any other questions

Does your dad have any familiarity or experience using a NAS OS like FreeNAS or Rockstor (that's a newer OS that we just added to our line-up - you can read about it here). Our Storinator Q30 might be a good fit. Its 30-drive slots would give him lots of room to grow into as he amasses more files. It is rack-mountable, but is compact enough to sit on a desk or shelf somewhere instead. (And it's whisper-quiet - we have one in our cubicle area. It sits about six feet away from me and I never hear it running). We have many other video producers using this model, and are happy with it. Anyway, don't want to get too sales-y on here or anything! Feel free to DM if you'd like more info