Revisiting SAN's

[danger]

It's has been a long time since any one in the best of my knowledge has talked about using protools with anything but directly attached drives.
Has any one done anything with SAN's or other non directly attached drives??

[Chief Technician]

If you have Pro Tools|HD v10 or later, there is a function called Disk Cache that effectively allows you to use a SAN volume for audio record and playback. I haven't personally tested it with a SAN.

[Drew Mazurek]

I just set up a 16TB NAS. I mostly plan to use it for backup/cloud/hosting but I have colleagues that say you can work directly from it which would be cool.

Testing that part soon.

[danger]

I would be very interested in the results. Thank you

[Drew Mazurek]

Originally Posted by danger

I would be very interested in the results. Thank you

Worked perfectly in my first test.

I copied a session from a local audio drive to a shared folder on the NAS. I then unmounted the local drive and launched the session from the share. I immediately hit play so that it HAD to play over ethernet (while caching in the background) I proceeded to mix for a bit and it never once hiccuped.

This is with a hard wired ethernet connection BTW. No way to test wireless right now.

[Matthew Steel]

I guess people interested in this topic would know (but I will throw this out anyway in case some don't) that it has been possible to use shared storage with Pro Tools for a long time. At our facility we have been using an iSCSI solution for almost a decade, sharing a RAID box among three ProTools workstations. We record directly to it, and play back directly from it as our primary storage.

Having said that, the system is old and somewhat complex and has limitations like one write user per logical volume at a time. Seems like advances in storage and networking in the last 10 years should bring us closer but nobody seems to be doing anything besides locally attached drives or high end RAID stuff yet either.

So I'm interested in hearing success (or failure) stories too.

[AdHawk]

We're running two nMP PtHD11. Pegasus2 Tb as DAS on one machine, sharing the drive over ethernet.
Works fine, except sample loading times in Spectrasonics VI:s.

[danger]

Thats a ThunderBolt Raid. Was more interested in Iscsi or NAS

[Bill Denton]

Prior to PT 9 or PT 10 (I've forgotten which), Avid loosed some of their storage requirements.

Prior to that time, Pro Tools used "direct disk access", which is why people who recorded to their system drive often ended up with a "scrambled" disk.

Direct disk access is a very old technique that was use to improve performance of then-slow hard drives by allowing the application to directly access the disk, instead of going through the operating system.

It's a bit complicated and I don't have time to more fully explain it now, but Google should show you something on the topic...

[Chief Technician]

Originally Posted by Bill Denton

Prior to PT 9 or PT 10 (I've forgotten which), Avid loosed some of their storage requirements.

It was Pro Tools|HD 10 with the introduction of Disk Cache.

People have been able to use unsupported setups from Studio Network Solutions and others for years.