I Can Build That For...

[billroper]

daisy_knotwise and I have had continuing discussions about recording multi-track music directly to hard disk. One of the requirements for this is redundancy, so that it's difficult to lose what you just recorded. (Or what you recorded six months ago, for that matter.)

Now, I already own Cubase SX3 which is perfectly capable of functioning as a 24-track hard disk recording program. I'm certain to within reasonable doubt that it will run on my Athlon 64-based laptop. But the hard disk in the laptop is of finite size (which gets more finite when recording multi-track music) and it's not conveniently removable and storeable.

It struck me today that the thing that would make this work conveniently is a network attached storage appliance with removable, hot-swappable hard drives. Of course, these are very expensive, costing multiple thousands of dollars, at which point you get back around to the question of buying a hard-disk recorder, but all of these have *something* that gets in the way of actually buying them.

So could I *build* a NAS? Something that would fit in -- let's say -- a 2U space, with one built-in hard drive to hold the OS and two mirrored swappable drives (probably Serial ATA) in caddies that cost on the order of $25 each (for the caddies, not the drives), running Linux? With a network port on the back so I could just plug my laptop into it when on
the road and then plug the homebrew NAS into my home network for use when I'm back in the studio? (Both the laptop and the studio computer run Windows XP, Home and Pro respectively.)

And how much would this beast cost? (Before hard drives. Those can be added as required.)

Any thoughts?

Comments

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

This sounds sort of like my photo problem, but I don't have a feel for your data volumes. I shot about 9GB of personal photos last year, probably slightly more than that professionally.

My workflow is intended to cover the reliability issues:
1) Copy raw images to computer.
2) Rotate as needed and sort into directories.
3) Generate PAR2 files for each directory, 10-20% redundancy.

Things split here for personal or professional. Um, P for Professional, N for Non.
P4) Burn to CD or DVD (depends on data volume)
P5) Various editing occurs.
P6) Generate PAR2 files for final edits
P7) Burn to CD/DVD

N4) Various edits, resizes, etc.
N5) Burn to DVD at the end of the year.

If you want HD storage, there are some options. For simple data volume, just slap a large drive in a USB enclosure. I have one I carry to the office for making DVD's since I don't have a burner at home. Simple PnP, works great, but there's no redundancy. If you've made DVD's as above, that's not a horrible problem, the danger is limited.

If you really want a box with RAID-something, the first thing I'd do is ditch the requirement for hot-swappable. You don't need it. If a drive needs to be replaced, power the box down. There's only one of you, you're not going to be editing while you're swapping in a drive. Once you accept that, there are ATA RAID controllers for $1-200 IIRC. $200 will get a cheap PC from Walmart. $400 before hard drives.

If you want rackmount, Tegan knows of someplace in Detroit area that resells leased computers. They apparently have rack mount units for not much. A Pentium I would be plenty of power for this.

Oh, for....

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

No, you don't need to do that. Any decent-sized hard drive (and by decent-sized, I mean 40 GB or larger) will do just fine, as long as it's either Ultra ATA or USB 2.0. The limiting factor is the recording speed, i.e., the speed with which the raw data is recorded to the hard drive.

I found this out while recording And They Say I've Got Talent (which was recorded on my home-brew system). I was recording the main audio tracks onto my external 60 GB drive, which worked fine until I started getting more than a few, say, five or six. I couldn't figure out what was going on, as my recording program (Vegas) has effectively infinite tracks and minimal system requirements. And there had been a few earlier projects, recorded to my internal HD, which had worked fine, and --

-- and then I stopped, checked the connector for the external HD, and discovered that, while my motherboard had USB 2.0 ports, I hadn't activated that capability in WinXP. Funny how going from 12 Mbps to 480 Mbps smoothed out the audio. ;)

Anyway, I use a direct mic input on my Audigy 2 card -- piping the AKG through an AudioBuddy phantom power supply. That's it.

Upshot: If you've got any audio input on that laptop, and active USB 2.0 ports, a single external hard drive and any ol' phantom power will do the job.

Re: Oh, for....

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

I think you missed the point of Bill's query, which was about redundancy to protect the data against hard drive failure.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

You not only *can* do it, but there's a specilaised linux-based turnkey solution for it that costs about 25 dollars, IIRC. Hang on...

[RUMMAGE, RUMMAGE, "Latest issue of Micro Mart", RUMMAGE]

It's called NASLIte+, and it's here:

Bootable from a CD-ROM (requires a floppy drive to store config files):
http://www.serverelements.com/naslite-plus.php

Bootable from a USB flash drive (no floppy required):
http://www.serverelements.com/naslite-pusb.php


Note: It may not provide all the features you'd normally expect from a NAS device. I don't see any mention of volume snapshots, for example - which would be the feature that would instantly swing me to building one of these!

Or you just buy a ready-made one from Australia:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=11213&item=5770321582&rd=1

=:o}

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

You can get basic ATA RAID controllers for more like $20 to $30 these days. A lot of motherboards now have basic two-drive or four-drive RAID controllers by default. You only need to spend more if you want RAID level 5, which is pointless unless you have at least 3 drives in the array.

[rinioth.livejournal.com]

As Paul says, building the box is easy and cheap.

You have two choices really.

1)
A networked box with raid'ed drives. It can be based on a really cheap PC running Linux. If you spent a bit more money for slightly bigger drives the box could also act as a house system file/backup server. This would give you safety for all the files on your computers not just the music. If you really want redundancy you could fit some sort of tape backup system to it too.

2)
A USB, or perhaps firewire, raid box to plug into your laptop. An advantage here would be that it might be possible to get something small enough that it would be portable.

Re: Oh, for....

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Which is what CD-Rs and DVD-Rs are for. Yeesh. :) I put all the .WAVs for any given song into the same folder, and then back up the folder to two or three disks -- figuring that one might have a bad sector, but it's unlikely that all of them would have the same bad sector -- and put 'em away. In a year or two, I'll make fresh copies, which gets past the problem of hypothetical physical media degredation.

Not everything has to be a brand-new whiz-bang solution. Whiz-bang from ten years ago is often quite sufficient.

Re: Oh, for....

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

NAS is hardly brand-new whiz-bang. I've been looking at having a home NAS for a couple of years now, but have been getting by with just using my spare windows box as a fileserver. It's now feasible to turn just about any old PC you have lying around into a NAS box using a ready-made UNIX distro with just the bits you need. The only extra cost likely is about $30 for a basic IDE RAID card.

Hard disk space is actually cheaper than the equivalent number of CD-Rs and DVDs. And the other thing about CD-Rs and DVD-Rs? If your data is very dynamic, they just become out of date within a day and have to re-created (which takes time and disk-swapping). A raid array is kept up to date automatically, freeing the user to actually *use* the danged PC instead of keep managing the data.