OWC ships 4-bay Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 RAID box
By Darren Murph 
posted Apr 14th 2009 7:47PM
posted Apr 14th 2009 7:47PM
posted Apr 14th 2009 7:47PM
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I thought raids were 25-man.. drives?
I wish i could run a RAID MULTI-BOXING THESE!
( DOUBLE MEANINGS FTW )
Who else lost interest after reading the first 7 words? I know I sure did.
You're lucky, I didn't understand shit till i started reading the comments.
Well, it doesn't say NAS, it says RAID. So I wasn't really expecting an Ethernet port.
Incidentally, the company that actually produces these have a NAS version:
http://www.macpower.com.tw/products/hddmulti/hydra/hydra_lan
Here is the one from the article:
http://www.macpower.com.tw/products/hddmulti/hydra/hydra_superscombo
Man! If it had an Ethernet port, I'd be totally sold! But this doesn't make any sense to me.
(Before ranking me down, read the last sentence again, especially the part where it says TO ME)
@loocas, there are many reasons to use a RAID such as mirrored backups and especially performance increase for photo/video apps.
for the layman, put even 2 drives together in a striped raid configuration (which created one "virtual" drive) and you're gonna see a significant boost in read/write performance. This is gonna make photoshop work extra fast.
I would love to see some numbers on these things. Healthy amount of cache and a solid oxford SE... Cheesegrater maybe, but I like this cheesegrater.
Anything that doesn't stutter while getting the shake and final cut mojo on is fine by me.
They provide benchmark results on some of them so far, check out the page for the 8.0tb one.
ok, so I just took a look at the numbers... Its hard to compare the performance data of these units with those of G-raid due to the fact that their sample file sizes are much different and OWC doesn't indicate which Raid it used for their performance data.. So assuming OWC was using Raid 5, and you marginally increase the transfer rate due to the smaller transfer file, I would assume that the OWC beats the G Speed eS and for a few hundred bucks less.
Quickly put for the film peoples ... I would go with the OWC if 8 Gigs is enough.
I'm pretty sure this enclosure uses the exact same RAID hardware as the grossly overpriced G-RAIDs (Oxford 936QSE). There are only a handful of 4 bay enclosures that use it now and most are pretty expensive given the fact that the chip runs under $100.
I have to agree that the benchmarks aren't at all conclusive. Seeing as how the the chip is the port multiplier and RAID controller, and they are the same chip, any differences will be purely academic.
nice machine
Could I have this with two distinct RAID sets? I'd like to have the four drives, with RAID 1 for the first two and the second two, but separately (if that makes any sense...). Or, would I have to buy two 2-bay enclosures with RAID?
It makes no sense , specially with that price tag.
For 700 euros I bought a nearly new Netgear ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer which does everything a NAS and/or RAID array could possibly do to make one happy and then some.
As far as I know, nobody does RAID 1 with more than 2 drives (ie, running multiple mirrors). It's theoretically possible, but most people would just do a 2-drive RAID 1 and then throw in some hot spares. A theoretical mutli-mirror RAID 1 setup would give you highly parallel reads but of course single-disk write speeds.
What this all means to you is yes. If this device supports 4 drives and RAID 1, that pretty much means they expect that you'd create 2 2-disk RAID 1 volumes. Or you could do RAID 10 across 4 drives for maximal hotness and speed. RAID 10 is really where it's at when you don't care how much your redundancy costs you -- RAID 5 (and other distributed parity methods) are the "cheap" route for those who don't want to buy double the disk capacity of what they "need".
RAID 10 across 4 drives should give you the 2x the write speed of a single drive and 4x the read speed of a single drive (theoretical maximum). That also assumes that the controller supports parallel reads on different halves of the mirror, but anything that's hardware RAID should do that. Even my Mac Pro's software RAID does parallel reads.
Thank you so much for the detailed reply. I might have to pick one of these up as I'd like a Time Machine drive (which is also backed up), as well as a network drive to back up my Windows stuff (MacBook with Win 7 on Boot Camp).
I'll have to look at RAID 10 a bit more as it sounds pretty intriguing.
Thanks again!
just buy 2 mercury elite pros. it's cheaper.
This doesn't do NAS so you can't use it as a network drive.
I forgot to mention it would be connected to an AEBS, which would provide the network access.
i am not entirely convinced that the speed gains are worth it for AEBS. I would check out the 7200.11 1.5TB drives, barefeats has some good benchmarks and they have fixed the firmware issues. Cheaper and more logical. Even 2x1.5TB in a OWC mercury elite pro on your AEBS would be more about 1 disk, as opposed to speed.
you can find tech specs from the company that actually make these here:
http://www.macpower.com.tw/products/hddmulti/hydra/hydra_superscombo
it appears that the eSATA connection (the one that pretty much goes directly to the HDs themselves) is the fastest.
the controller boards in their products are garbage.
I know direct connect is faster and all, but it's strange they never went with a port multiplier. That seems to be the trend nowadays.
PM works by allowing a single port on the eSATA controller to be connected to multiple individual SATA drives.
This device presents the 4 internal drives as a single device to the host. If you were to use PM with this, it would be a PM-capable controller in the computer connected to several of these units, each representing a single "device".
What's funny is that you can find similar enclosures on Newegg now for around $200. You can then go and spend $360 on 1TB drives and save yourself $600+.
Really? You want to follow that up with a link? Because I've been looking for a bare four drive enclosure that supports combined volume sizes over 2TB and has 1394b for over a year now and I haven't found it. I'd love to see one for $200.
Yesssss!!!
The Keynote coverage of MacWorld and WWDC every year!
You people did a great job!
LAN VERSION? http://www.macpower.com.tw/products/hddmulti/hydra/hydra_lan
What would be faster in real world gigabit LAN or eSATA by how much
I'm loving the case!
I'd prefer it if they shipped one without drives so I could use existing ones, other than that eSATA and usb are enough (the usb only for compatibility, it'd hurt being limited to usb speeds with such an array)
This is cute, I love it.
Gorgeous raid package.
This would be useful for downloading every TV series you watch in HD or DVD image rips. Every single season. All 200 series you watch. Continuously downloading, un-rar'ing, and par'ing all year around.
You'll also be able to do what I do with Netflix. I'm on three-at-a-time. The day I receive the discs, I decrypt and rip the DVD image to the hard drive, put them back in one enevelope, return, and have three new DVD's every two days.
Everyone should have an external RAID, rather it's equipped with NAS, Windows Home Server, or just an external RAID controller. You can easily move them from one computer network to another, sharing with your friends and coworkers.
BTW does anyone know what version (if any) of Vista supports dynamic Raid 1 Mirroring?
I'm told only Windows server does!
In XP my Raid 1 array works fine, but when upgrading to Vista Home Premium it can't be read.
... or you can buy a Drobo ... http://www.drobo.com/
But can the Turk play Chess? lol
OMG!! Who is their right mind would use a Deathstar to backup their data?
The same could be said about Seagate...and WD and Samsung...
All drives fail eventually.
Nice
Where can it be bought? I can't find any reseller.