Multiple Hard Drives. Raid

[AdvancedHome]

Does anyone have any advice on what I need to do to set up multiple hard drives for video storage?
I plan on mirroring the drives in pairs. Basically 2 1TB drives together for each place that I'll be recording video from.

The probelm is that I am going to need about 20 pairs of 1 TB drives.

Do they have to be setup to plug in with SATA to a card, or will USB 2.0 do the trick if they are all running off the same computer?

[kermitfrog]

There a different solutions for you. It depends on the OS you are running the
disc under. Linux/Windows/Mac ?

For USB and if the performance is not too important you just may get
an external USB RAID, like a Buffalo Link Station. But you also can do
the same with Linux or Windows Server if it's 20 times 2x1TB in 20
different location. If you want to have all this on one server/system then
you should get an external RAID system with 40 disc in one case.

Please be aware of the most systems only can address 2TB at once as
one partition and only newer/server hardware supports higher space
than that.

Kermit

[Mr Sots]

It will depend on the frame rate and image size that you are trying to record and indeed the application. USB is VERY slow compared to SATA or SAS disks so you may find you are dropping far too many images due to the storage being too slow if you go with USB.

RAID1 (Mirroring) can be configured using software but this will take up the controlling PC's resource and again, you will not be getting the maximum performance from your drives. The best way to manage RAID is using a hardware controller card.

Does each location require 1Tb? How long are you keeping images for? How far apart are sites? What WAN connectivity is in place?

[AdvancedHome]

Thanks guys.
There are a lot of different requirements for each location. I am trying to get my DVR customers transferred over to off-site storage.

The sites are all within 100 miles, some have DSL, and some are setup with CATV modems. I will have both here.

I am starting to think that this is going to get expensive fast.

This looked kind of cool, but it is USB (2 x 1tb RAID1) http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=466