HD For Indies

Firmtek recently released their two new products: the $100 Seritek 1SE2 PCI card with two external SATA ports, and the $170 Seritek 1EN2 two drive external hotswap SATA drive enclosure. You can also buy them as a bundle for $260, called the Seritek 1SEN2. They are designed to work together, and do so quite well.

What is this, and what does it let me do?

It's a card and drive enclosure that lets you put a standard, low cost, high speed Serial ATA (SATA) drive onto an inexpensive drive tray (extras are $22) and hotswap it in and out of the external drive enclosure.

So what's the big deal?

First off, why external SATA?

Why would you want to do this? Because it is faster than the alternatives - USB 2.0 is woefully slow on Macs, even on my dual 2.5 GHz G5 I can only get about 17 MB/sec.

FireWire 400 tops out around 35 MB/sec, and FireWire 800 tops out around 80 MB/sec, and that's for only for reads. My 1 TB LaCie FireWire drive tops out at 50 MB/sec...on SATA, that should be over 200 MB/sec with the four drives in the La Cie.

Even just using two relatively slow Seagate 7200.7 160 GB drives (the standard drive that ships with G5's) striped into a RAID 0 with Apple Disk Utility, I could get up to 110 MB/sec transfer rates for both reads AND writes. Even at it's slowest, at the very end of a striped pair of these drives, I still got about 75 MB/sec - about as fast as FireWire 800 can possibly go.

Even better, the device is hotswappable - additional drive trays are available for $22, so for scalable storage, it's tough to beat - if you need more storage, buy a pair or drives and cages and you've doubled your storage for about $45 more than the cost of the bare drives. External FireWire enclosures are at least $50 and up usually.

SATA drives also consistently deliver high performance. Unlike FireWire drives that can have bus contention issues when trying to capture media over FireWire (such as DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO50, DVCPRO HD, or using the AJA I/O breakout box), SATA keeps on rolling at full speed no matter what's going on with the FireWire bus. A big plus. These are a great way to work with projects for uncompressed SD (standard definition) video or for compressed HD video - be it DVCPRO HD, AJA's QRez, or BlackMagic's PhotoJPEG. Capture footage onto a pair or drives, work your project, and when done, just stick the drives in their cages on the shelf - easy archiving!
This give you fast, RAIDable, replaceable storage for things like video projects, with higher throughput than FireWire drives, lower cost, and doesn't tie up a FireWire port (no bus contention issues when capturing over FireWire for DV, DVCPRO, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD, AJA I/O, etc.)

OK, so tell me about it

This combination is made up of two parts: the card and the enclosure.

First up:

Seritek 1SE2 card

This is a PCI card that provides two shielded external SATA ports for connecting Serial ATA drives externally.

Unlike some of the other SATA cards I've been testing such as the Highpoint RocketRAID 1820a, the Netcell SyncRAID XL, and the Sonnet Tempo X 4+4 (the internal ports on that one, not the externals), the 1SE2 has sturdy external SATA ports so there isn't any cabling nonsense. The external ports are also shielded against electrostatic discharge, a concern the internal port cards face (risk of zapping your motherboard).

The SATA ports and cables provided plug in securely, and unlike some other cables and plugs that I've plugged and unplugged 20 or more times, the Seritek cables seem to plug in securely and hold snugly, giving me faith that they'll handle a lot of plug/unplug cycles. Good.

The card is also driverless, which is a huge relief - just plug it in and it works, so no having to worry about it dissapearing after a minor OS revision. While it works with the 1EN2 enclosure, it's just a generic SATA port host, so any viable SATA enclosure should work from MacGurus, or Granite Digital, or wherever.

Next up: The Seritek 1EN2 external enclosure.

It's pretty small and compact, which I like. It's aluminum construction is both sturdy and dissipates heat well. Like most external drive solutions these days, it has an external power brick and cord, and unlike SCSI, USB, or FireWire drives, each drive has to have it's own data cable. No big deal.

Here's how it works: when the unit arrives, it has no drives inside it. You release the locking latch, then lift a handle to disconnect the drive tray and pull it out. Take a SATA drive, set it in the drive tray, and put in four Phillips screws to attach it to the tray. That's it. Repeat for the other drive tray. You can take this thing out of the box and have two drives installed in less than five minutes if you've never done it before.

Then you just slide the drive trays (now with drives) back into the unit, press down on the releasing lever to solidly connect the power & data cables internally, and the locking latch clicks into place.

There is also a power light and disk activity light on each drive tray, but SATA drives don't have activity lights, so that one does nothing. But you can tell when the drives are powered up by the green glow of the LED.

There is a simple keylock underneath, so the drives can be secured inside the enclosure. Kinda secure, but it would still be cake to walk off with the whole unit. But still, it prevents casual removal, and would be a good enough deterrent to keep users from casually, inadvertently, or incorrectly removing the drive trays while in use (think computer lab at a school).

Internally, the 1EN2 has a simple but clever cabling solution - the connectors on the back of the drive plug directly into the back of the chassis with no middleman connections involved. This is good because the original SATA spec called for a single cable run from host directly to drive. The more cable breaks, junctures, sockets, plugs, cables etc. involved the more likely problems are to arise. This is about as direct a connection as you can get and still be removable. Because the guides on the drive

The main unit comes with four rubber feet you can put on the bottom or side of the unit, so that you can mount it either standing tall or flat on its side. If you want to stack two on these on your G5, you could just put the feet on the broad side and just lay the units flat, one on top of the other for stable operation.

Or you can mount it on the grey plastic "foot" it comes with that holds it steadily upright

The EN2 also has little connectors on the drive trays for protection from ESD (electrostatic discharge). A nice touch.

More notes:

-I like the compactness of the 1EN2 - it's barely bigger than a lot of FireWire 400 enclosures I've bought in the past.

-The fan is a bit noisy if you want to use it in an editing suite, but future versions will have a quieter fan, and current buyers should email Firmtek if the have a problem with the noise level of the unit in hand.

-The fan and design of the cooling system did a good job though - after several hours of operation without spinning down, the outside of the case was only slightly warm - so I don't expect this unit to overheat in normal use, ever.

-If you need even higher performance for uncompressed HD, Firmtek will be showing their 4 port internal and external SATA cards at MacWorld San Francisco next month (I have a write up on that I'm working on too). Two of these 1EN2 enclosures will hold 4 drives, and those will stripe up into an array capable of 10 bit uncompressed HD if you use the right kind of drives. Drives such as the 300 GB Maxtor Maxline III, the Maxtor DiamondMax 10, and the Hitachi 7K250 and 7K400 drives all give at least 60 MB/sec of maximum performance, and all give at least 30 MB/sec at the very end of the drives. If the drives won't give the necessary performance to the last little bit, just partition with SoftRAID, or configure Final Cut Pro HD to leave enough room on the capture disks that you don't get into the trouble zone. (Partitioning is a better solution, though).

In Use:

Since the whole thing is driverless, just shut down your computer (G4 or G5), install the PCI card, put drives in the trays, connect SATA cables & power to the enclosure, and fire it up.

Use Apple Disk Utility or SoftRAID to initialize your drives and set up a RAID 0 (for twice the speed) or RAID 1 (mirrored data) if desired. SoftRAID has the added benefit of allowing you to partition an array among other benefits.

They've also taken pains to make sure that the drives and your computer are protected from ESD (electrostatic discharge), both on the card and in the enclosure. The internal port cards such as the RocketRAID 1820a and Sonnet Tempo X 4+4 may not have this protection as far as I can tell.

PERFORMANCE:

With a single Seagate 7200.7 160 GB drive (the same kind that ships in G5s), I got the same performance that I would have from an internal SATA drive - about 55 MB/sec. Striping a pair of them together into RAID 0 gave 110 MB/sec reads and writes as I would have expected. At the tail end of the array, I got about 75 MB/sec. This matches the performance if I striped a pair of drives internally in the G5.

These enclosures will work with anybody's SATA cards, there's no magic to them. So if you have a Sonnet card or 1820a card or whatever, these enclosures will work just fine with those too, you can stripe across multiple enclosures. I'm really looking forward to Firmtek's own 4 external port SATA cards to be shown soon, 4 of these enclosures would work well for an 8 drive hotswap solution.

What you can't do, however, is put two of these 1SE2 cards in a Mac and expect to get twice the performance. Because they are PCI not PCI-X, this creates some problems. For 4 (or 8) drives, Firmtek will have 4 port cards soon (check at MWSF) that I've tested and gotten impressive results from.

HOT SWAP: HOW IT WORKS

I've never hot swapped a SATA disk before, but the OS handles it just fine. It gives a warning about change in SATA config after you unmount the disk then release the latch, but this makes sense - it's just telling you that a SATA disk has dissapeared as far as it knows. You can instruct the Mac to ignore that situation in the future, so it will let you unmount the disks and not give a warning each time. Pressing down the latch to reconnect the drive made it reappear on the desktop in short order, no muss, no fuss. As it should be.

The manual covers the basics of installation nicely with clear diagrams, a welcome additional after some other external SATA cases I've dealt with that contained nothing (are you listening, PPA, Inc.?) There is also a brief section on troubleshooting.

I used to recommend FireWire drives as an easy, low cost archiving mechanism once I realized a couple of years ago that FireWire drives were cheaper than tape backups (not even including the tape drive!). This creates an even lower cost backup methodology, and the only other thing besides the drive that you have to stick idly on the shelf is the low cost drive tray. A deal! So long as you have a Mac with working SATA external ports, you can always plug those disks back in. (In a pinch, they could be mounted internally if you had to, also.)

For video editors working with anything but uncompressed HD, the Seritek 1SE2 card and 1EN2 enclosure will be a fast, stable, low cost, hotswap drive solution. You can use drives singly, or if you need greater performance, stripe them in pairs.

A few quibbles:

The "foot" falls off the unit when picked up - it was designed to be the leave behind piece if you wanted to tote the rest of the unit in a backpack, not a permanent piece. This surprised me picking it up.

As with almost all drive enclosures these days, it has an external power brick. The brick has a funky and unique separate plug to go to a regular power socket, so don't lose it, it isn't interchangable with the standard computer gadget electrical cord.

FireWire has the advantage of ubiquity these days - any Mac running OS X probably has it, with the exception of some early iBooks. External SATA drives, while fast and low cost, rely on the presence of a SATA card with preferably external ports. There are a handful on the market, but it's not something the vast majority of

It'll be interesting to see if this gets adopted in lieu of FireWire drives. For those needing cheap, scalable speed, it's a winner...but whether that speed difference and lower overall cost can overcome the lack of ease of interoperability FireWire drives have between facilities remains to be seen. It's faster than FireWire 800, but not massively (at least with a two card array). FireWire 800 will never be fast enough for uncompressed HD, but that's a fairly small portion of the overall market.

IN SUMMARY:

PROS: fast, inexpensive swappable storage, small form factor - there are single drive FW cases that take up more volume. Low cost, a good archiving solution for projects - just unmount and put on the shelf. Driverless. Good manual covering the simple installation. Works in G4's as well as G5's. Great for any SD and compressed HD projects, great for archiving.

CONS: unlike FireWire, it relies on presence of SATA card which not all Macs have, can't daisy chain like FireWire, drive docks are a little vulnerable (you can see the electronics when the drive trays are out of the unit, not when in use, but they can't get scratched by setting them down.)So is a good expandable solution for inhouse, not so good for sharing with other offices/facilities unless you know they are similarly equipped. In a pinch, you could mount the drive internally, but that's 10 minutes with a screwdriver you don't want to spend. Since it's only a PCI, not PCI-X, you have to be careful with your installation configuration with other cards to avoid bus slowdowns.

COMPETING PRODUCTS: Granite Digital has some external hotswap enclosures that are larger and more costly. MacGurus.com has their Burly Box line, which larger, costlier, and has more cable jumps, but is less expensive once you get into the larger sizes. Their drive trays are also fully enclosed, which makes me feel better. It's solidly built. I have two of their fixed enclosure units, which are working OK but take a while to put together. (I should review those, too.)

If you need a storage solution that is faster than FireWire 400 or 800, and is inexpensive to archive with, and need the speed it affords, this combo is a great solution, especially since it is sold as a bare kit where you add your own drives and don't pay a needless markup for 5 minutes of assembly.

You can put together a 800 GB RAID 0 setup with these for under $1000 capable of as much as 120 MB/sec and always at least 66 MB/sec. You can put together a similar 600 GB RAID 0 for under $700. You really can't beat that speed for the price anywhere else that has hotswap capabilities with this ease of use.

If you're an editor of compressed or uncompressed standard definition video, or are working with compressed high definition video, this is a great small studio solution. Fast, and easy to swap out project drives. Finish a project, stick it on the shelf for archival purposes. Easy to get back to - just mount it. Need to archive a project? No problem, just buy a drive of the correct size, put it on a $22 tray, back it up and shelve it. Need to back up an 800 GB project? No problem, put it on a striped pair of 400 GB drives. Flexible, fast, simple. Granite Digital and MacGurus both have some similar products that I haven't hands-on tested yet, but after working with the Firmtek kit, I like it and would recommend it.

Whether you want to work off of these drives as capture/edit/playback drives or just use them for archiving, this is a great little solution. And if you need more storage or faster storage, just look forward to the upcoming 4 port SATA cards at MWSF.