Accusys ExaSAN A16S3-PS review
Is this furiously fast storage array the future for HD video editing?
The affordable ExaSAN A16S3-PS beats Thunderbolt 2 hands down for performance making it a top candidate for 4K video editing.
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Excellent performer; Innovative PCIe 3.0 connectivity; Good value; HBA and QSFP cable included
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Snapshot synchronisation is very slow
RAID features
RAIDGuardX offers a lot of useful RAID options as you can designate drives as global hot-spares and expand arrays into new drives. The controller itself supports up four RAID arrays and automatically assigns LUNs when they are created.
Accusys has added features that will appeal to video editors that need stability. Accessed from the Preferences menu, the equalization mode is designed to prevent frame dropping by smoothing out data transfers.
The most interesting is slicing which allows you to create separate partitions within an array. Each partition is spread across all drives in the array and is assigned a unique LUN which the hosts sees as a separate volume.
It's easy to do as we reduced the size of slice 0 from the Options menu and handed over the free space to create two more slices. After assigning new LUNs to each partition, we rescanned the bus from the host system and were presented with three new drives.
Snapshots provide point-in-time backups where we selected source and target slices. These must be the same size and we found the synchronisation process very slow with it taking over a day to complete for a 6TB slice.
The ExaSAN delivered impressive raw read speeds in our Iometer tests
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