An Unofficial Companion Guide to the Glyph ForteRaid Drive Array

Audio by Design by Garrett Audio

After many years of producing and engineering for various types of media projects, utilizing single drives for the various assets, then backing up to optical disks, I decided it was time to move into the world of Raid drive redundancy. I have, at various times, used Raid 0 setups, but that speed has a trade off…protection. After much research between various vendors, manufacturers, and creative pros alike, I decided I would enter the world of small drive arrays by purchasing a 4 disk 4 Terabyte Raid 5 array. Utilizing eSATA, this would allow me to edit from the array while having drive redundancy. Should I encounter a drive failure during editing or while making backups of projects, I would just need to replace the failed drive with a new drive and the array would rebuild itself automatically. In a high-end system, in theory, one could actually continue to work while the rebuild was taking place. In my case however, for the work loads that I normally deal with, I do not need to start out with a high-end array so I chose to go with the Glyph ForteRaid 4TB unit, for various reasons as described in this article. It was upon setting mine up, that there were a few instances that weren’t really clear enough for setting up the Raid array correctly to operate on a Windows PC such as mine. So, I decided to write this article to help others in configuring their own.

Though there are a few documents related to configuring the Glyph ForteRaid hard drive array, it is hard to come by the correct way to configure it for using a Raid 5 setup for a Windows 7 system while utilizing an eSATA connection. This guide is on how to prepare the ForteRaid drive array to run on your Windows 7 PC in Raid 5 mode. There are no warranties, guarantees, or implies of any type here that these steps will work in your particular setup. This is only a guide and it is not endorsed or used by any manufacturer, dealer, or distributor. Use at your own risk or peril of loss of data. Again, this is for configuration as a Raid 5 setup only. As always, remember to backup your data to another location before attempting formatting of a hard drive, as the data WILL be deleted.

I chose the Glyph ForteRaid 4 Terabyte drive array solution as it met my needs, my budgetary constraints, my Raid desires, and offered the best overall warranty, while Glyph’s reputation still preceeds itself. Many other manufacturers were considered, such as OWC Mercury Elite Pro (which is pretty much the same unit as the Glyph), the G-Technology Speed Q, and the Sonnet Fusion. Realistically, they all offer similar performance, raid options, and standard warranties, however, Glyph offers an additional 2-year basic data recovery, and 1 year advanced replacement warranty above and beyond the standard 3 year warranty for the hardware itself and 3 years on the drives. As a side note regarding G-Technology, I had the opportunity to setup a 4TB unit for a company that uses a Mac Laptop. Setup was fairly straight forward, but there was no real confirmation that the drive was setup correctly. It does display a popup window at the end of configuring the Raid setup as per the instructions, but it does not read simply ‘setup complete’. Also, the available Raid choices were only 0 or 5 and there was no monitoring function at the time. Hopefully these items will be modified to help the user in the near future. I was glad to have gone through this process as well, which gave me the chance to know how their system gets configured and runs, as well as it was in my top 3 choices of array’s to purchase. read more...

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	Glyph ForteRAID Production Quality RAID Array 2TB $488.00			Glyph ForteRAID Production Quality RAID Array 8TB $999.00			Glyph ForteRAID 12TB Production Quality RAID Array $1,399.00