In Review: EZQuest Studio V

DV by Ned Stoltz

With the almost universal adoption of solid-state workflows, even individual editors who up to this point either daisy-chained FireWire drives or relied upon JBOD RAIDs, now see the need to move to the capacity, speed and redundancy that more powerful RAIDs offer.

This segment of the market is also the most price-sensitive. Many content creators just moving to RAID might also be shooting lower-data-rate formats such as DVCPRO HD, AVCHD or Sony XDCAM. They may be editing in formats up to ProRes HQ or somewhat higher DNxHD rates. Thus, they would have no need for units with dedicated I/O cards and expandable drive capacities. This is just the market niche that EZQuest is targeting in their Studio V series.

The Studio V interfaces to Mac or PC via a single eSata or USB 2 cable. For SATA operation, all that would be required is a PCIe SATA card (two-port cards run under $200) or a computer with an internal SATA port. A little known fact, for example, is that the MacPros have one unused SATA port on the logic board. EZQuest bundles with this unit an internal jumper cable with connectors and slot interface. Of course, they include instructions. It has five drive bays.

The Studio V is controlled totally by the front panel. Simply follow the simple menu commands and the unit will create a RAID 0, 1, 5, or 10 configuration. For video purposes, RAID 5 is the preferred configuration, striping parity across all of the drives and allowing failure of one drive.

After creating the RAID using the control panel, then partition and mount using the host computer’s disk management software. The manual thoroughly explains both PC and Mac set up.

My test unit came populated with five 2TB Hitachi drives. Configuration was a snap. Just pop in the drives (they do not ship in the enclosure), turn on the unit, follow the set up menus to create a RAID 5, creative one RAID partition in Apple Disk Utility and voila — it mounts as a RAID with a formatted capacity of 8TB. read more...