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Good Hard Drives
I’m looking to get a fast Raid system set up to On line HD stuff at full res. I need storage for 6 Hours worth and have a BM HD card – my old scsi setup isnt hacking it so It needs replacing.
Any one got any great ideas?
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7 Replies
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6 hours of what? DV, HD, uncompressed? You basically have three options. SCSI, Fibre Channel or SATA. SCSI and FC are the most dependable and expensive. SATA is up to the task and much cheaper; but has no redundancy.
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6 hours of uncompressed – sorry
Where can i find out more about the differences – I know about scsi and have a chassis with 8 drives in but they are too small and I need to do Uncompressed HD and dont think theyll be quick enough – Fibre channel or SATA it is then!!!!
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Sean,
I recently posted “Roll You Own Low Cost 1.2 Terrabyte SATA Raid” on the FCP forum. You should check it out. Raid-0 throughput averages about 230Mbps.
DRW
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This is the answer to your question. Uncompressed HD is the most demanding of all current hard drive applications. There is currently (and this is changing quickly) only one way to do uncompressed HD to SATA. That is with a Sonnet Tempo 8 (or Highpoint Rocket Raid) 8 port SATA card, and eight
SATA drives, all stripped together RAID 0 (no redundancy). Some will tell you that the Highpoint can do RAID 5, but you will have issues – believe me.
Good companies to buy stuff like this from are http://www.maxxdigital.com, and promax.com.For a much more solid solution, fibre or SCSI solutions will better suit your need. For uncompressed HD, I have used the fantastic HUGE U320RX-4.0
for SCSI, and the HUGE 4210 Fibre Channel Array. Both offer RAID 3, and both work wonderfully with Blackmagic products and the ATTO cards. Of course, the Apple XServe RAID is a fibre channel solution that will work as well, but you won’t get the support that you get from HUGE Systems. There are other companies that offer turnkey solutions that work well too for SCSI and Fibre – like Medea and ADTX.If you want to spend as little money as possible, stick with SATA, but don’t expect the reliability that you will get with Fibre or SCSI. To be clear, SATA drives are VERY STABLE, but stripping 8 drives RAID 0 on cards with “weak” connectors is a little nerve racking. Again, this will change soon, as the port multiplier boxes for SATA are released very soon.
Bob Zelin
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Bob,
Have you seen these issues with the Highpoint controller card on both macs and pcs?
Thank you!
Wolfgang Neun -
you will suffer with a Highpoint card. The highpoint card at one time was used by both ProMax and The DR Group, and I believe that both have stopped using it (I could be wrong about this). I have tried the Highpoint card in the past, and have had nothing but problems with it. Cards from both Firmtek and Sonnet have been terrific. The Highpoint has INTERNAL PORTS on it, and you have to snake the lines out the back of the MAC – it’s a mess, and if you look at http://www.barefeats.com, you will see the recent problem both they and ProMax had with the card.
With that said, I use SATA with uncompressed STANDARD DEF and DVCProHD (you only need 2 SATA drives to get great results), but you need EIGHT SATA DRIVES stripped at RAID 0 (which means the Sonnet Tempo 8 card) to get uncompressed HD to work, and in MY EXPERIENCE, you will not have the stability that you get from a HUGE 4201 or Apple XServe RAID. So proceed at your own risk. If you have the money, buy the HUGE.
Sonnet is about to release the new Tempo E4P with the Fusion Port multiplier chassis, and these products may be much more reliable for doing SATA uncompressed HD. But they ain’t out yet. That’s like asking opinions on Blackmagic hardware that is not released yet. Only a fool would speculate on it (but with that said, Blackmagic, rarely disappoints anyone in the long run).
Bob Zelin
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Im giong to buy DL extreme card , with the Ausus A8NSLI-premium
and AMD athalon64 4800 dual core
with 4 250 GB sata 2 HD (raid)
and Gforce 7800GTX VGA
and 2 GB RAMcan this system do the job of working with 10 bit uncompressed format
i work with digital betacams so my input and output is uncompressed format PAL
im going to capture up tp 8 hours and work with itcan i get a good performance ?
is there any problems ?sorry for bad english
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