[geeks] Anyone familiar with old Medea VideoRAID hardware?

[Joshua Boyd]

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 11:02:30AM -0400, nate at portents.com wrote:
> Picked up a couple of Medea VideoRAID SCSI 2/80 drives at the MIT Swapfest
> recently, never encountered them before.  I was wondering if anyone had
> any experience with them, and changing the drives in them... they're about
> 7 years old.  Avid bought out Medea a few years ago, so there is no Medea
> website, but I found a few bits of info on Avid's site, like this:
 
> http://avidtechnology.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/avidtechnology.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=73316
> 

<snip>

http://forums.creativecow.net/medeadrivesystems

You might be able to find some information there.
 
> Anyway, the 40GB (WD400) drives in the enclosures work, but the bearings
> are worn and they are noisy (that sort of metal grinding sound old non-FDB
> drives make when they age), and I've tried but been unable to come up with
> any solid information on swapping in other pairs of drives... seems Medea
> liked to sell and support the enclosures as a single system and encourage
> owners to trade up to newer Medea/Avid hardware.

I am surprised at the WD400.  The unit I have only will take certain
families of IBM/Hitachi drives, up to 120 gigs. Thile the unit that is
on the way is a bit more flexible.

Anyway, as far as I can tell, they never use special drive firmware, but
a lot of hard drives still won't work correctly.  For various models on
the CreativeCow site, you can find posts by Avid employees mentioning
drives that will work.  Unfortunately, the search feature sucks.