Last night was another work night at NewPointe.  Here’s what went down.

–> Data/phone lines were run to the kitchen.  This is funny, because I remember doing the wiring plan thinking When will we ever need phones and data in there?  Well here we are, 6 months into the building and they’re being installed.  It just goes to show you, never say “never” and don’t lay down too many absolutes when planning a network.

–> A 12-drive eSATA array made its way to our Final Cut desk.  Since mid-March, we’ve been making it a point to archive video from our services from the weekend…at least one of them.  The problem comes with the fact that our video system is HD (it looks great, but it’s a double-edged sword).  Recording HD video will stretch your hard drives to the limit.  Compressed HD runs about 60 or so GB per hour (which is great compared to uncompressed HD, which is upwards of about 650GB per hour).

Enter the Norco DS-1220.  It’s got some pretty good reviews on it and so far I’ve really liked what I’ve seen.  We loaded ours up with 12 750GB drives; 10 for the array and 2 for hot spares.  The only drawback I’ve seen with this board is that it comes with a PCI-X eSATA controller, and since our MacPros don’t have PCI-X on them, I ended up buying a HighPoint RR2314 eSATA controller to work with our Mac’s PCI-express.  Other than that, I’m pretty happy with it thus far.

Next Work Night:  It’s gonna be a cable-pulling extravaganza.  We’re putting some much-needed data and phone drops into the control and editing rooms, and also taking care of some AV lines in the process.