Using unsupported high capacity drives in an enclosure

S

Shookster

Registered
I need ~18 TB of storage for a movie I'm working on. I've been looking at Fibre Channel enclosures but most of them seem to only support drives up to 500 GB. I found this: http://www.shentech.com/994098sn.html and I emailed Adaptec support to ask if they would support 750 GB hard drives (12x2x750 = 18 TB exactly) and I was told that they had not been tested. Do you think there would be any problems? It's a JBOD system which means OS X will end up seeing it as a single drive - can OS X handle drives of this size?

Thanks.
 
I've heard of the Mac Pros having problems with 750 GB internal drives, but nothing about external. Adaptec would probably know best..
 
I've already contacted them and they said they don't know because they haven't tested it. I asked if they had a newer enclosure that they had tested it with and they said no.

I don't see why the enclosure wouldn't support 750 GB drives, but I can see why the OS might not support two 9 TB drives.
 
What's your budget for this project? There are some 750 GB drives out for the mac, so the 750 drives may work, if you want to take that risk. As long as you have the right connecters, it should work with the 9 TB drives (The xserve RAID supports up to 7 TB with 500 drives..). I don't really have experience with this kind of stuff, though, so you should wait for a second opinion.
 
The post production budget hasn't been allocated yet, but I made it clear to the producers that we would be looking at $25-35k for the equipment and they were ok with that.

Whether the 750 GB drives work with Macs or not doesn't matter because the case will be concatenating them into one big drive. What I want to do is fill them up with 24 750 GB drives and if we start running out of space, I can replace some of them with 1 TB drives. I just wanted to know if I would run into any problems by using drives that aren't tested with the enclosure, and what these problems are likely to be.
 
For that kind of capacity I'm not sure an enclosure such as that would be suitable anyway. You should try looking at appliances from companies such as Network Appliances ( www.netapp.com ) which specialize in high volume storage. It won't be cheap though, we are currently looking at a 20TB storage solution which is coming in at around the £119K mark including backup facilities.

Also backing up that kind of drive capacity should be considered, unless of course the digital movie files are considered disposable.
 
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