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Filed under: Hardware •

CalDigit HDElement RAID Review

Storage. It’s always an issue. It seems that no matter how large a hard drive I buy, in a short matter of time I’ve filled it to capacity and am looking for the next solution. This is especially true for me because I tend to work with a lot of tapeless formats. One solution is a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). RAID comes in a number of configurations, but most pro video RAID systems offer the benefit to users of building large capacity storage solutions that have an increase in performance and increased reliability against failure. What’s not to love? Lets start by taking a look at what comprises a RAID and where it may or may not fit into your workflow. Read on…

What is RAID?

Essentially a RAID is several disks that are addressed in one form or another as one large capacity hard drive. RAID systems can either be hardware controlled systems or a software controlled RAID (such as they type you may build internally in a Mac Pro using existing HDD slots).  Now there are several types of RAID systems which you can build; for example a RAID 0 which just lumps all the drives together and treats them like one giant disk. The benefit of writing to all drives simultaneously is that this will give you the absolute fastest performance. The problem is because the data is spread out across multiple disks, when one disk goes out, well you’re out of luck. There are several other types of RAIDS that seek to provide a compromise between performance and reliability. These arrays repeat the data in one of several methods across several drives so that if one drive fails the entire array can still be rebuilt.

So what is the advantage of a hardware RAID over a software RAID? Well for one, software controlled RAIDs are often limited in capacity because you can only place so many drives in your system internally. Additionally software RAIDs can be more CPU intensive than hardware RAIDs. So with hardware RAID solutions, you are potentially looking at increased storage as well as better performance. And in the case of the current Mac OS (10.5) certain RAID types are only available with a RAID controller card (RAID5 is one common example).

Recently I had the opportunity to test drive the HDElement from CalDigit. The HDElement is a compact, sturdy 4-drive external enclosure driven by a high performance hardware controller card. CalDigit’s RAID card offers support for RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 50, 60 and JBOD. As previously stated, a lot of these arrays are simply not supported on my Mac Pro’s software driven RAID.  The controller card uses a multilane connector and is capable of daisy chaining up to 3 external arrays together. It also includes a system monitor to track temperature, RPM and other hard disk vitals.

Out Of The Box

The CalDigit external bay features the beautiful looks and styling very similar to my Mac Pro, and yes, I’m a sucker for looks. You access the enclosure from the rear using a key. The drives mount securely in removable tray. NOTE: Because of this rear-loading configuration, this enclosure would be ill-suited for a hot swappable solution where you are constantly swapping HDDs. Once the HDDs are loaded, you install the hardware RAID card into your system. I found CalDigit’s literature and installation process very easy to read and the installation was pretty straight forward. I have installed my share of RAIDs and believe me some of them are very complex. I did find fitting the controller card in my Mac Pro to be a tight fit, but with a little massaging I managed to get it in. The HDElement connects to the internal card using a MiniSAS multilane connector. I love this solution, as I already have quite a few cables and running extra SATAII connectors isn’t a very neat and clean solution. I found the locking connector very secure and the fit snug.

Setup

Once everything was connected it was time to boot up. The first time I booted my Mac Pro after installing the hardware, my system completely froze and wouldn’t start. No happy Apple logo, no spinning beach ball, just the drab gray screen of death. After several tests, I determined it was in fact the CalDigit card and called their tech support dept. After a little bit of troubleshooting they deduced that it was the on board battery on the card that was causing the issue. I unplugged the battery and the system booted just fine.

Once the system has been rebooted you can then proceed to setup your Raid. CalDigit provided good paper documentation, something sorely missing from a lot of products I have tested. Additionally they have provided a step by step installation tutorial video on their website. If you have any questions it is definitely a good place to start. Overall the setup process was very straightforward and easy. I found their Raid Shield software very intuitive and easy to use.


Performance

So now to the real question; how did the drives perform? Well first off, let me give you the numbers and then we will stack up those against real world improvements. Read on to Page 2 for our results and conclusions…

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Kendal,

Thanks for the article. It comes at a great time.

Can you elaborate more on the crashes? 3 crashes in 6 weeks is what I would consider a deal breaker for any work environment.

Were these crashes unique, or was it something that Caldigit was aware of?

Thanks again

Bryan Fowler

Posted by Bryan Fowler  on  08/31  at  06:35 AM

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Kendal,

Did you happen to mention which size HDelement you were working with (2GB, 4GB, etc)? My apologies if I overlooked this.

Thanks for the valuable info.

Kevin

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  08/31  at  08:38 AM

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It was a 4x1GB HDDs. I also made CalDigit aware of the crashes at each step of the way. At this point I would just assume it was unique to my system but I cant say that conclusively. All I can say is what happened and pass that information along unfortunately I didn’t get any real conclusive information from CalDigit about the situation.

Posted by Kendal Miller  on  08/31  at  10:45 AM

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Seems to me there are better and less costly solutions on the market. I use the Sonnet Fusion 800. It has cost me € 1600 without the drives, so as a 8x1 TB system gives me 6TB RAID 5 protected storage for around € 2500. With it’s double E-SATA interface its blazing fast and it has not failed me one second since I installed the system a year ago.

Martijn

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/01  at  05:53 AM

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Thanks Kendal for the update.

I would hope that with a RAID system designed for the production world, that it would be hard to find one with system failures.

Maybe I’ll hold off on Caldigit for a while. My MacGuru raid has ran without a hiccup for over a year. (alas, it is not RAID 5, so I have to have another backup.) =\

Posted by Bryan Fowler  on  09/01  at  12:27 PM

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I agree crashing never instills a sense of confidence does it? Frankly that really surprised me from a vendor as well known as CalDigit.

Posted by Kendal Miller  on  09/01  at  01:09 PM

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Kendal,
Thanks for the report. I’m curious though. What happened with the battery you had to pull out to start the system? Did you put it back after it started or is your card working sans battery and thus forgetting its settings every now and then? Can that be the cause of the crashes?
Thanks

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  09/01  at  08:32 PM

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I put it back the first time it crashed. Subsequent calls to CalDigit gave me no other feedback so it stayed in for the duration of the testing.

Posted by Kendal Miller  on  09/01  at  08:37 PM

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Modern software requires ever-increasing amounts of disk space and free memory, leading to constant hard drive access both to retrieve data from the program directory and to store data in the ‘virtual memory’ space that Windows puts aside on the hard drive.
DVD Rentals by email

Posted by DVD Rentals by email  on  09/19  at  05:19 AM

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Perhaps policing of the comments is on order (DVD rental ad above)?

I am surprised by your internal Mac Pro RAID 0 speeds. We raided 2 and had over 200 MBps. Your internal RAID write of only 79 is slow.

I have a MBP with an eSATA card and with a single, bare external drive, I get performance better than 79 MBps.

Posted by IEBA  on  09/21  at  08:08 PM

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