Future Cut Productions Equipped With Sonnet RAID

Sonnet Technologies, Inc. announced that its Fusion DX800RAID high-performance, eight-drive RAID SATA storage system was recently purchased by London-based Future Cut Productions, Ltd. for use in the production, mixing, and remixing of albums for Shakira, Rihanna, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor. In addition to meeting the company’s growing storage needs, the Fusion DX800RAID was chosen by Future Cut for its high performance and ability to keep working in case of a drive failure.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor

Comprised of Darren Lewis and Tunde Babalola, Future Cut Productions produces most of its music using a Mac Pro. The process has resulted in a number of hits, including Lilly Allen’s debut album Alright, Still. Prior to their recent purchase of Sonnet’s DX800RAID, the duo relied on a sprawling mountain of external FireWire drives chained together to meet their storage needs, a slow and unreliable solution.

"The DX800RAID has freed up our computer’s FireWire bus, which improves stability for our soundcard and outboard digital processors, and its use of a dedicated PCI Express RAID controller provides vastly improved speed over FireWire and USB drives," said Lewis. "Our primary concern in choosing a storage solution was providing a backup in the case of a drive failure. Not only does the DX800RAID offer this capability, but it enabled us to move from a total of 2TB of storage to eight 1TB drives, it has also proved to be a convenient solution for meeting our storage capacity needs for large and numerous music files."

The Fusion DX800RAID is designed to provide reliable, flexible, and high-performance direct attached storage for studio and office use. With its eight drives formatted as a RAID 5 group (data protection for a single-drive failure), a Fusion DX800RAID yields read and write file transfer speeds of up to 815 MB/sec and 715 MB/sec, respectively.

The reliability of the Fusion DX800RAID is further enhanced through SES (SCSI Enclosure Services) 2.0 compliance, a feature more commonly found on enterprise storage systems, as well as enhanced S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) data reporting for each hard drive installed in the system. Integrated into the Fusion DX800RAID, SES functionality provides enhanced real-time monitoring and reporting of drive, power supply, and temperature status, all conveyed to the user through utility application screens and the illumination of conveniently placed LEDs on the enclosure. S.M.A.R.T. data criteria can be used to notify the user of an impending drive failure, thus enabling the user to minimize downtime as a result.

"As writers/producers of music, we feel that the Fusion DX800RAID comfortably copes with everything we throw at it. Streaming audio off of a drive is incredibly fast, which means we can continue to build tracks without fear of overloading the system," added Babalola. "It also ensures we can keep working in spite of a possible drive failure, and it improves our workflow by eliminating the need to keep switching external drives."