Dramatic How-To: Building a 16TB Raid Array for $45 per TB

Here are links to the components I used to make the HDD Array in the video above:

Amazon:

• Seagate 4TB HDD ST4000DM000
• Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 ProBox 4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure

Newegg:

• Seagate 4TB HDD ST4000DM000
• Mediasonic HF2-SU3S2 ProBox 4 Bay Hard Drive Enclosure

Today’s camera technology has advanced to the point where we can shoot 16 bit RAW video at 6K resolution and beyond. While the video quality achieved by these modern digital cinema cameras is impressive, the files they create are massive. In the early days of shooting digital video, 1TB could provide dozens of hours worth of footage. Now days, 1TB can be gobbled up in an hour of shooting or less. In order to manage all of these large files, you need to buy hard drives. When it comes to video production, external hard drives are the way to go because it’s a way to keep projects separate from your computer so you can easily move them and manage the project. There are many external hard drive options available from companies like G-Technologies, Lacie, Seagate, Western Digital, and others. However, when you look at the price you pay for what you’re getting, it’s not really the best value.

If you want to get the most for your money, then you should build your own Hard Drive Array. It’s quite simple really – just select an enclosure and HDDs to install inside. Then configure the RAID. When it comes to enclosures, I like Mediasonic. They make quality 4 bay and 8 bay enclosures in either software RAID or hardware RAID configurations. The video above demonstrates how to assemble a really nice 4 bay software RAID hard drive array for yourself to save a boatload of money! How much savings, you ask? Check out the chart below to compare for yourself (be sure to click to enlarge):

As you can gather from my chart, building your own RAID Array typically costs about half the price of the pre-built units. This is the most inexpensive way to store all of that data that your video production projects require. Aside from the cost savings benefit, I like that you have the ability to select which hard drives and enclosure to use in your array. This gives you the ability to customize whether or not you want a software RAID or hardware RAID solution, how many bays (4 or 8), as well as which I/O ports you need (depending on the enclosure). I like MediaSonic enclosures because they are well made, inexpensive, and offer both USB 3.0 and eSATA. Unfortunately, according to my research, there are no enclosures with Thunderbolt as of yet. Hopefully MediaSonic will make a Thunderbolt enclosure soon. Granted, in real world usage USB 3.0 should yield very similar read/write speeds as thunderbolt because the bottleneck occurs with the spinning disk HDD in use. Of course, if SSDs were used instead, you would see a big boost in speed with Thunderbolt vs USB 3.0, but that would be insanely expensive! However, I do like that Thunderbolt gives you the ability to daisy chain drives together. As far as speed is concerned, I’m really impressed with the RAID 0 performance. As you can see from the video (and the picture below), the write speed is 385MB/s and the read is 386MB/s. This is almost as fast as a single, non RAIDed SSD, and about 3 times faster than a single, non RAIDed HDD. Technically, these Seagate 4TB drives are not even the fastest spinning disk drives available. They are 5900rpm as opposed to the faster speed 7200rpm. Therefore, if you were to use the more expensive 7200rpm drives, I would expect speeds to be close to 500MB/s.

Technically, these Seagate 4TB drives are not even the fastest spinning disk drives available. They are 5900rpm as opposed to the faster speed 7200rpm. Therefore, if you were to use the more expensive 7200rpm drives, I would expect read and write speeds to be close to 500MB/s.

I hope this blog has been helpful and will save you money on your next RAID Array. Use the comment section below if you have any questions or any information to add to the topic of RAID Arrays. Thanks for reading!