Okay, so I am getting ready for HiDef work. Step one is to improve my storage ability on the network. My two video workstations are on a gigabyte network which serves us quite well. I evaluated several NAS boxes and settled on the Thecus 5200. A bit more expensive than the others but it had 5 bays instead of 4 and a USB port where I could plug in some of my archival hard drives.

I bought four Seagate 1-TB drives. The newer kind with high reliability … a few more bucks than the standard drives, but I thought it was worth it. It was easy to install the drives since each drive had a slide out tray accessible from the front.

Shown in the photo you see my messy network cables behind the Thecus 5200 and the two USB 500GB HDs. The interface to the USBs is very slow, about 7 MBS so I only use them for archival storage. The Thecus also has a USB printer port that I am not using at this time. All in all, a great unit.

I was up and running in no time … not a problem … that is, except for me! My problem is that I have been around since the dawn of the microprocessor (really - I was a research engineer at GE when the Intel 4004 microprocessor was invented) - and still think in terms of hard drive as hard drives and not as Raid configurations. So, in my ignorance, I set the Thecus up in a JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks) configuration. Expecting to get four 1-TB disks, little did I realize that I would get one 4-TB configuration … any disk fails and I loose it all. Yikes!

Easy enough to change to Raid 5 configuration. It just took a bunch of hours to reconfigure the NAS. Raid 5 appears to be a reasonable compromise for redundancy and maximum use of the disks. In Raid 5, assuming all the disks are of equal size, you only loose one disk to redundancy. Minimum configuration is three HDs. So, at 4-TB I get 3-TB of file space. When I need more I can slap in a 5th 1-TB drive and increase my capacity to 4-TB. I am a happy camper.

With the NAS sitting on the gigabyte network I can edit from either work station with only a slight hit in performance. Since Raid 5 needs to write to all 4 drives, there is a small bottleneck on writes.

My normal work flow is to work off the internal HDs of my workstations, but it is nice to know that if I have to tweak an old project I can do it on the NAS.

AND, the Raid 5 does work. Once again stupidity steps to the fore. While I was doing a transcode of files, and we all know how long those take, I noticed that when I installed the HDs in the Thecus I didn’t lock the trays … so guess what … I had nothing to do, so I started locking the HDs. Okay, you are ahead of me now. Yup, I jiggled one of the drives and it detected a fault and took the HD off line. The Thecus reconfigured the Raid to 3 HDs without missing a beat and I didn’t loose data.

When I got through flogging myself, I went back into the Thecus admin screen, verified that the 4th drive was healthy and then re-integrated it into the Raid configuration. Now this is the amazing part. It took many hours to reincorporate the drive … but I continued to edit the files on the Thecus with out a noticeable performance hit. Now this is my kind of NAS!