Monthly Archives: September 2020

Thunderbolt Storage in the field: Part 1 – The Gamma Carry test

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I’m testing the new Accusys Gamma Carry thunderbolt storage in a series of blog posts with real life situations. Filming on location and editing with a remote team requires a combination of good workflow, great apps, and excellent storage. The Gamma Carry is small sturdy box meant for on set and on location editing and camera off loading. It also survives going back and forth between your office and your home office, and wherever you need to go. Disclaimer: I was not paid to write this review and this blog post is an ongoing field test with storage required by every day editors making films using local thunderbolt storage and the cloud. This is their story.

In the beginning….

The start of every creative editorial project is choosing the tools needed for the job, and working as team to make it happen. Making a film requires the hard work of everyone, not the least the IT / Tech who supports the crew and prepares the gear. On set the DIT (digital imaging technician) copies camera cards to multiple hard drives and backup devices before going back to the office to copy them to LTO (archive tape storage), but before the DIT can do their job the IT / Tech has to set up the RAID and design the best and safest backup and archive workflow.

Gamma Carry Overview

The Gamma Carry is an 8 drive external RAID box and it really small and sturdily built. There is a solid metal handle built into the top case and the drives carriers where you put the drives are metal and very solid. This entire unit is built to be solid and protect the drives it contains. The drive tray have a pin to lock the track in place when inserted as well as a thumb screw to lock them in. All drives must be attached with provided screws which is not as convenient as some others with quick plastic tray mounts, but this metal cage for your drive is solid and feels safe for a RAID that will probably be transported everywhere. Keep the data safe!

There are other little touches which are well thought out. The blue red green blinky lights are perfect for any Christmas holiday party and tell you important information about the state of your RAID at a glance but you with one button push turn off all the blinky lights. And keep working in the dark editorial suite not bothered by anything blinking. There’s a mute button and an extra port on the back with 60W to charge your laptop via the RAID. Very useful.

Gamma Carry The Setup

The set up of the Gamma Carry software wise is identical to the Accusys A12 T-Share which I set up recently and once you have the Accusys Mac installer then you have the RaidGuardX app. And the usual IT caveats apply, the software is not signed so you will have to right click on it to open it up. Hopefully they will sign this and notarize their software to make this easier for end users. Also there is a requirement for JRE to run RaidGuardX which means downloading and installed Java on your Mac. Also not optimal but only necessary for the RAID setup.

RaifGuardX detects the Gamma Carry

The set up of the Gamma Carry is the same as the Accusys A12 T-Share and a raid array you built with RaidGuardX will be recognized in the Gamma Carry. That could be a good thing, or not. I did have some excitement when it recognized the array I had built previously (I used the same drives form the Xsan setup). And this was the next step to resolve, because tp create a new array, or delete the array then create a new one I have to do one more thing. Since they were used with an Xsan I had a LUN label that identified them as such and had to remove this LUN label before proceeding. Occasionally we see this issue when re-using drives that had once made up a RAID which was part of an Xsan.

Delete the existing RAID array…. button grayed out.

Xsan to the resuce.

To see the RAID arrays avaialable when building an Xsan you can use the cvlabel command to list them. You can also use it to remove this label. WARNING: Do not do this when connect to an Xsan or Stornext storage network. Unless you know what you are doing. You are warned. This is dangerous. Removing a LUN label can bring down the entire SAN. That’s it. Now you know.

sudo cvlabel -l                                      

/dev/rdisk3 [ACCUSYS Gamma Carry      366] acfs-EFI "accusys"Sectors: 46881814495. Sector Size: 512.  Maximum sectors: 46881814495. Stripebreadth: 0.


sudo cvlabel -u "accusys"           

*WARNING* This program will remove the volume label from the
          device specified (accusys).

          After execution, the devices will not be usable by the
          Xsan. You will have to relabel the
          device to use it on the Xsan.


Do you want to proceed? (Y / N) -> y
Requesting disk rescan .% 
                                                                                     sudo cvlabel -l                          

/dev/rdisk3 [ACCUSYS Gamma Carry      366] unknown  Sectors: 46881814495. Sector Size: 512.  Stripebreadth: 0.

So all is good again now we can create new RAID arrays now that the Xsan LUN label was removed. Back to work! Once the drive is set up in Disk Utility as a new volume then you’re ready to go. In this case I added one more drive and created a 5 drive RAID5 set and formatted as HFS+. In my testing this was fast enough and would be faster if all filled with drives or SSDs. There are variations of this hardware with SSD ports instead of 1 or 2 drive bays to allow quicker ingest of SSDs which have camera footage on them.

Speed test of a 5 drive RAID5. Fast enough!

I then set up 48 hours of drive copies via Hedge for some testing of the RAID hardware. Thanks to Hedge Connect I get notified when the large copy finished. In this I was copying Thunderbolt 2 and 3 external hard drives (thunderbolt but hard drive and not that fast) to the Gamma Carry to be copied. The source drives are slow. Copying from SSDs would be way faster.

And of course Hedge found some minor warnings with these old drives. People don’t like LTO archival tape and want to have stacks of hard drives, but that data on those hard drives won’t last forever. Keep your important data in three places on two different kinds of media (tape, cloud, drives etc). This test of mine was to copy off old drives and use the Gamma to re-organize and re-sort for a new edit project. Now to back up to the cloud and set up Postlab projects with postlab drive for the proxies. In the mean time the editors can get the original footage when I carry over the Gamma Carry thunderbolt RAID.

This is part 1 and after some more testing I will publish some real world tests and experiences.

Thunderbolt Xsan: Set up a T-SAN

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Setting up your very own Xsan at home… What could be more exciting? Nothing like SAN storage to cure those stacks of hard drive blues. Don’t have a spare fibre channel switch or fibre channel storage at home? No problem Grab some thunderbolt storage from Accusys and join the fun.

I am testing the A12T3-Share 12-drive desktop Thunderbolt RAID solution to build my Xsan. Accusys also have a 16 drive rack mounted raid storage box if you want to install a nice pro set up in the server room you have tucked neatly in your home office. Ha ha. Seriously, the 12 drive unit is whisper quiet and would be a great addition to any home lab or production storage setup. I mean, aren’t we all doing video production at home these days? And even if we are doing a proxy workflow in the clouds, we still need to store the original footage somewhere before it goes to LTO tape, or backed up in the clouds (hopefully another cloud). A few years ago I tested the Accusys 16 drive Thunderbolt 2 unit and it worked perfectly with my fibre channel storage but this time I am testing the newest Thunderbolt 3 unit. Home office test lab is GO!

It is a pretty straight forward setup but I ran into some minor issues that anyone could run into and so I want to mention them and save you all the frustration by learning from my mistakes. Always be learning. That’s my motto. Or “break things at home not in production”, but if your home is production now, then break things fast and learn very quickly.

First step is to download the software for the RAID and you’ll find it on the Accusys website.

(I found the support downloads well organized but still a bit confusing as to what i needed)

The installer is not signed which in our security conscious age is a little concerning, but examining the package with Suspicious package should allay any concerns.

The installer installs the RAIDGuard X app which you will need to configure the RAID.

Of course, RAIDGuard X needs a Java Runtime Environment to run. Why is this still a thing? Hmm…

RAIDGuardX will allow you to configure your connected Thunderbolt hardware.

Configure the array as you like. I only had four drives to test with. Just enough for RAID5.

Choose your favourite RAID level. I picked RAID5 for my 4 drives.

The first gotcha that got me was this surprisingly simple and easy to overlook section. “Assign LUN automatically” asks you to choose which port that LUN (the configured RAID) will be assigned to. If you don’t check anything like I didn’t in my first run through then you configure a RAID5 array that you’ll never see on your connected Mac. Fun, right? Ha ha.

Xsan requires a sacrifice…. I mean, a LUN (available RAID array). Check your Fibre Channel in System Information. Yes, this is from the thunderbolt storage. Hard to believe, but it’s true!

Setting up enterprise grade SAN storage requires a trip to the Mac App Store. Server.app

Open Server.app, enable Xsan, create a new volume and add your LUN from the Accusys Thunderbolt array. Set the usage to “any” (metadata and data) since this is a one LUN test setup.

Pro tip: connect your Xsan controller to your Open Directory server. Ok, just kidding. You don’t have an OD server in your home office? Hmm… Create an entry in /etc/hosts instead.

If you’ve set up your SAN volume then you will see it listed in the Finder.

Easy shareable SAN storage is possible with thunderbolt RAID arrays from Accusys. No more Fibre channel switches needed. Small SAN setups are possible for creative teams without a server room. This setup was a quiet 12 drive RAID and a Mac mini. Add some Thunderbolt cables. There are four thunderbolt 3 connections and you can add more with an additional RAID. Up to 8 connections with one of them for the Mac Mini running the SAN. Not bad at all. And Xsan is free. Add a Server app from the App Store, but the Xsan client is free and built-in (Xsan has been included with macOS since 10.7 so many years ago). Fibre channel protocol (even through Thunderbolt) is faster than network protocols and great for video production. Fast and shareable storage at home. Or in your office. Thunderbolt Xsan. T-SAN.