MacGurus Burly RAID

     with 6Gb/sec SATA/SAS RAID Controller

      Video Storage par excellence

          Hair on FIRE Performance!

Hardware RAID    RAID 3, 5 or 6    for All MacPro      PCIe G5 (DualCore)

 

Read rob-ART's Review at:

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  The Burly RAID is here. High end ARECA PCIe Hardware RAID Controller combined with our Burly - the most reliable storage enclosure you can get today. The Burly RAID has the speed, reliability and ease of use at a price that is impossible to beat. And included is your MacGurus personal tech support team. Capable of running on PCIe Macs (MacPro and G5) or most any PC running Windows, Linux and most other operating systems. (see specifications for list)

  The ARECA Hardware RAID card supports virtually every RAID type. Either RAID5 or RAID3 for streaming media gives superior performance. RAID5 for general purpose storage, photos, databases and the like. This system also supports RAID6 which allows protection from 2 failed drives! Perfect for the high priority database server. And of course RAID0, RAID1 and combined RAID0+1 are supported along with JBOD (non-RAID) mounting of individual drives. You can create volumes in any combination of the above as well. This may be the way to have both a database and a backup all run off the same controller card.

  A word of caution: Hardware RAID, which provides redundancy in the form of parity data stored on the drives, is NOT to be considered 'backed up' all by itself. RAID3, 5 or 6 protects from hardware failure of a drive, or in RAID6, of 2 drives. That is it. There are literally hundreds of other failures that can cause data loss that are not protected by virtue of a redundant RAID. The most important consideration when planning your storage system is how you are going to back it up.

 

Performance

  An 8 drive RAID5 or RAID3, using current Seagate or Hitachi drives, is capable of over 600 MB/sec when empty and still holds 500 MB/sec when the drives are 80% of capacity! This performance is plenty for uncompressed HD footage up to and including 2k (2048 x 1556 30fps) Performance is even better using the new Hitachi SATAIII drives.

 

Reliability

  Reliable storage is what the Burly RAID is all about. The ARECA Hardware RAID cards are a mature, easy to use hardware RAID card and administrative utility combination that provides the maximum in data security and robustness. RAID processor unit, 512MB 800MHz DDR2 cache on the board, and an easy to use browser based utility. This card just rolls along handling the high processing overhead with no load at all on your computer's CPU. This is true even when running degraded with one drive out of the array. No fuss, no muss - continue operating until you have a chance to change out the drive and allow the RAID to rebuild itself. Performance is nearly identical degraded as with the full compliment of drives. That is the result of the huge amount of processing power from that Intel processor.

 

Ease of Use

  Simple to install, easy to run. Management of the RAID is done with a browser accessed utility that is remarkably intuitive. I say that because many administrative utilities are nearly impossible to use, this one is pretty straight forward.

 

Drivers and Firmware

  From the start you will want to run the most current drivers, firmware and management utilities. As the OS updates, you may need to also update drivers. Those are available on the ARECA Download Page. Just select your particular card and follow the links. Following is current 1223-8x links.

OSX - Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion Driver and Utility

EFI Boot ROM Download - needed to install and boot the operating system on drives attached to this RAID card.

 

Options

Rackmount or Tower Enclosure.

  Rack is standard 4U - 16.8"d x- 6.95"h. Does not include sliders, those should come from your rack manufacturer. Enclosure is drilled for General Devices C230 Series. 400 WATT internal power supply.

Tower Enclosure is 7"w x 18"d x 17"h. 300 WATT power supply.

External Cables

  Default selection is a pair of 2 meter MiniSAS external cables. You can select optional 1 meter cable on need.

Tray Selections

  You can choose between Standard Tray System, LCD Display Tray System or Trayless drive bays. My favorite is the least expensive Standard Trays. You don't do much drive swapping in a hardware RAID, typically only swapping out for a drive failure or a major upgrade. The Standard Tray System has the same extraordinarily good heat transfer system as the fancier LCD Display and Trayless. But if nothing but "state of the art" will satisfy - we'll be happy build it your way.

Drives

  MacGurus' engineers are continually running tests on available model hard drives. We select drives based on compatibility for the widest range of uses, that have the best performance possible, and most important, are the most reliable. Data security comes first. Our purpose is to weed out and reject drives that have problems before they get into our customer's systems.

  At this time Seagate Barracuda and Hitachi Deskstar drives meet our demands best. That said, with Seagate having acquired Samsung's drive business and Western Digital now having purchased Hitachi's drive division, there really are only two manufacturers. No matter how many or few manufacturers, our selections will still be based on testing of individual models and not brand name. And always with reliability outweighing all other considerations.

  Current model SATAIII Seagate 7200.14 drives are the killer choice for performance. With 1TB platters and extraordinary performance (up to 180 MB/sec from a single drive) you will drool over how these drives handle your workload. Hitachi SATAIII Deskstars are a great choice as well. With performance up around 150 MB/sec, they come close to the performance of the new Seagate. Either choice will serve you well.

 

Specifications:

Areca - 2 x MiniSAS connector PCIe RAID Card		Mac 10.6 Tiger through 10.8 Moiuntain Lion   *Mac OS Bootable with EFI Boot ROM Updater
Onboard Intel RAID Processor		Windows 2000 / XP (SCSIPort driver) Vista and Windows 7
PCI Express Rev 2.0 8 Lane - OK in 4 Lane slot		Windows Server 2003/2008 (SCSIPort driver and Storport driver)
512MB DDR2 800 MHz on board cache		RedHat Linux and SuSE Linux
Intel RAID6 engine		FreeBSD
RAID Level 0, 1, 1E, 3, 5, 6 and JBOD		Solaris 10x86
Multiple RAID selection		UnixWare 7.1.x
Online RAID Level / Stripe migration		Netware 6.5
Online RAID capacity expansion and RAID level migration simultaneously
Automatic drive insertion-removal detect - rebuild
Supports S.M.A.R.T.
SMTP support email notification

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**NOTES on Drives** Macgurus uses Retail Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, 7200.12 or the 2TB and 3TB Hitachi Deskstar drives in all our enclosures. These are the very best hard drives made for all desktop and workstation purposes, especially in RAID arrays.

Server and Enterprise drives have feature sets designed to increase performance in large server environments and huge Enterprise RAID farms - these features will not improve performance and may degrade reliability on desktop systems. All desktop host bus adapters are designed and tested to run with desktop drives. OEM drives may have server firmware on them which can make them unsuitable for desktop usage.

 

The Gurus Certify This Burly Rules!