I have additional stuff to add to my review of the CalDigit HDPro Raid solution. I posted it to the original review, but wanted to make a new post as well so that I ensured that people saw it.

ADDITIONAL NOTES:

OK, I forgot to mention something that impressed me. And for some reason I thought it was common among other RAID 5 solutions, but I hear it is rare. OK…after I yanked out the drive and then put it back in and started the Raid rebuild, I realized that I could continue to work with the drive as it rebuilt the raid. The performance of the raid dropped from 400MB/s to 190MB/s, but I was still able to access footage on the timeline and edit. It did the rebuild in the background. This means that there is ZERO downtime with this. VERY handy feature.

Now, the other feature is something I discovered while working the show at IBC. I mentioned to the CalDigit folks that it would be really nice if the unit had an audible warning when a drive failed. Currently you can set it up to e-mail you if anything unusual is happening, but it would be nice to have an audible warning as well. “Oh, we have that!” was the reply. And Alex Chen, the owner, showed me where this was. In the RAID SHIELD software, you open the controller and then click on PREFERENCES. In there you will find an option called BEEP. Check that and when you hit OK you hear the unit beep twice to indicate that the feature is active. So when a drive fails, or the unit starts to overheat or other issue occurs, the unit will beep. Sweet!

AND the units aren’t only for the Mac. It is cross platform, so it works on the PC as well. It works with Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro (we ran a PC with CS3 on it playing footage, and Matrox uses the CalDigit units in their booth), and recently it was found to work with an Avid as well.