Hi, here's the thing. We've got three editing stations(Mac Pro). At each of them there's a Soundminer V4Pro, we haven't got the server edition. Currenlty our database consists of over 1 TB SFX. They're all on a D-Link hard drive with LAN support. We are using samba to connect the drive to each of stations. It works, however we don't have much control of all the LAN traffic. Do You have a better solution? Our goal is to improve the download transfer from the LAN storage, and also to have a history of downloads for each station. Thanks for all answers! Regards
3 Answers
Considering how cheap 1TB or 2TB drives are, whats stopping you having a local copy of the library on each Mac? Why bother with network access? You can still have a process for adding to the library (& updating the clone copies)
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On the first look its seems a good solution, but: 1. There are times that other people work on theses macs (not employees), and we don't want them to have full acces to our database. 2. The network storage is in a machine room which is more fire proof then a simple editing station. We are making also a daily backup on that drive. 3. There are 3 editing stations, but we want to have acces to the database from 2 mixing stations.– MuksNov 20, 2011 at 9:26
Because of the flooding in Thailand, hard drives are not cheap at all at the moment: they more than doubled in price, at some vendors even tripled. And it is expected to stay that way at least until march 2012.
(Statistics from a huge collection of Dutch web shops for the Samsung Ecogreen F4 2TB drive. blue is average, green is minimum price)
(source: tweakimg.net)
That said, we have recently purchased the QNAP TS-809U RP, an 8-drive, rack-mounted, very configurable storage solution with redundant power, dual network and many data redundancy options. Currently with 4x 2TB and one spare disk, we have 6 TB of effective storage and one disk may fail. Later this can be expanded to 8x 3TB where two drives may fail without data loss. It can do 100 MB/s over a gigabit network, even faster if you use link aggregation on the macs and the QNAP (we have a 100 Mbit network, so it's a tenth of that here). This is regardless of protocol by the way: AFP or SMB don't make a difference in our case.
A history of downloads should be doable, but that will be tricky to set up. For example, you can have the SMB-server on the network drive log activity to a file, even to multiple files specific to one user. This will require knowledge of the file access protocol (SMB) and linux, and you need a NAS box with full access. See here for a glimpse of the complexity: http://moiristo.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/samba-logging-user-activity/
SMB sucks on osx .. get new NAS hardware .. something like readynas or qnap and use the iSCSI protocol .. not sure about sharing your search/download history search history
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iSCSI is a network proctocol? I googled readynas and their are recommending AFP for mac connections?– MuksNov 20, 2011 at 9:33
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