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best kind of hard drive when recording direct to laptop
Hello. I’m working in Vegas 6 so have to go the route of Serious Magic’s, or should I say ‘Adobe’s’ DV Rack 2HD with the Dvcpro50 converter. When recording directly from the HVX 200 to my laptop’s harddrive via DV Rack, should I use an external harddrive, or some kind of raid device to handle the amount of data coming down the line? Thanks.
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9 Replies
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It’s best to experiment. I have best results going to the internal and then transferring to a Firewire drive on my Powerbook. A RAID is a lot more secure but might be overkill. Also RAM is key.
Noah
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I’ve tested DV Rack with an Acer Aspire and a MacBook (non Pro). Both were pretty close to the limit with their internal 5400 rpm drives and DV Rack gave us occasional dropped frame warnings when capturing DVCPro (no problems whatsoever with HDV). Serious Magic is recommending a 7200 rpm drive for this format, which should work fine internally.
If you need more space and want more speed to feel safer, a small RAID 0 can’t hurt. But how would you connect it? IMHO both FW 400 or USB 2 won’t cut it, so we’ll give the new Apple MacBook Pro a try with it’s FW 800 connection. But we have not yet tested how well the FW bus performs under Windows, our RAID has not yet arrived. Another option would be a SATA adapter in the card slot to connect the RAID, which in theory should work fine.Regards,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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Thanks very much. With the price of P2 cards the idea of going direct to my laptop is inviting. I had the opportunity to demo the 200 and downloaded the Serious Magic software. However, I did not try filming directly with the DV Rack. Don’t ask me why. Foolish. In any event, I was more concerned I guess with seeing how the conversation application would work as I edit in Vegas 6. And it seemed to work just fine and the transfer of files was quick and without incident the few times I tried it.
As for the direct record, my drive is 7200 but only the 60gig and the Ram lacks a bit as does the processing speed at the 1.5 pentium M. If this arrangement was not beefy enough, what would the potential outcome when recording. Would it just freeze?
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You’ll have to expect dropped frames, normally DV Rack will give a warning.
Our Acer has Intel CoreDuo at 1,66 and 1 GB RAM. The clock speed is still a bit low for what Serious Magic recommends, but seems to work fine so far. I think it’s just the drive in our case.
Regards,
Uli
Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.
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FirmTek makes a PCMCIA to eSATA card so you can connect an eSATA RAID to your Mac laptop. We use it all the time in on-site video editing situations, works well. You can actually edit 720p HD on a Mac Book Pro with the eSATA RAID.
Only thing to think about…the older model card doesn’t support port duplication so you’ll only be able to use 2 drives RAID’d together. The new card coming out does support port duplication, much better you’ll be able to double the number of drives. I might suggest formatting your drives full on RAID 5 for extra security, can’t hurt to mirror the data especially with all I’ve heard about the flakey nature of the P2 cards and losing/or corrupting data. -
So how does the Raid 5 help make it safer? Sorry, I’m just not up to speed on the striping process. Does it just mirror the data on another drive in the enclosure?
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No worries. I’m going to go with whatz in my brain but I know there is lots of info on the web about the differences between RAID formatting.
In my experience RAID 5 has the right mix of performance and failure protection for video applications. It takes a wee bit more on the setup but I think it’s worth it, and it is still straight forward, you can do it in software which is nice.
There are lots of factors that come into play when determining which volume stripping to use but for video I think 2 stand out: the speed at which you can read and write data, what happens if a drive fails.
read/write speed….
RAID 5 is a good compromise for keeping the throughput of data high because it allows reads to happen at the same time on multiple drives in the array. Reads are faster than writes. I’ve done real time records onto RAID 5 arrays and haven’t had a problem, haven’t done uncompressed real time writes, and I haven’t tried HD streams other than DVC PRO HD CODEC which is efficient as all heck. oooo I forgot to mention you do need 3 drives at least for a RAID 5.failure…
It’s true if a drive fails in a RAID 5 it will impact your array and slow you down but…it will keep going (system failures are tricker but hardware failures are more common and the RAID 5 will endure through a hardware failure. If you can setup your RAID 5 to create log files, just in case you have a system failure these log files will help you). Yes you can recover that data too, which is awesome. Most RAID formatting options allow for mirroring the data (or parity), it’s just how many identical copies, are they spread across multiple drives or to the same drive, if a drive fails can the other discs operate without it? A RAID 5 writes the same data on multiple drives, so if one fails you have a backup. It’s also nice because it doesn’t do the parity to just one drive, it’s spread across several so it’s just a nice little safety net as you can’t choose which drive is OK to fail and which one will cause you major hair loss.You can go totally hogwild with redudancy failure options in RAID land…you can write triple redundancy with some of the format options. If you were running a spaceship off your RAID I’d go with RAID 10 hehe.
Let me see….it’s hard to visualize what the heck RAID formatting is doing sometimes…ah ha! Here’s a site with some great graphics to help illustrate how it all works…cool! the text might be too dense with computer nerd-speak to grok but the pix are good.
https://www.bytepile.com/raid_class.php
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Well I have to say that was a very informative reply-Thanks!
I’m glad you mentioned DVC PRO HD CODEC because the footage I’m concerned about editing was shot on an HVX200 in 720_30P and I can’t offord to drop frames while editing and previewing with a client. I think I’m going with one of the latest Sata II enclosures, 4-5 500gig Hitachi, Seagate or Western Digital drives, Raid 5, and a Sonnett Express card with port multipliuer for my MacBook Pro.
I’ll put up a post with data-transfer speeds as soon as I get it up and running.
Please let me know if you have any further info I might need for the setupThanks again.
Robert
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OK-So I just got the Sonnet Fusion 500, 5 400gig Seagate Sata II drives and the Sonnet express34 for my MacBook Pro. Hooked everything up and after having to remove and re-insert one of the drives, they all came up under Disk Utility in Mac Os 10.4.8.
Now I just have to figure out how to stripe three or four of them and leave one or two for a backup destination.
Any suggestions on how to stripe these bad boys??? I temporarily striped 3 of the 5 drives using the Disk Utility Raid option and just to provide some data #’s as promised:The following data was obtained using the AJA KONA System Test 2 which I downloaded from https://www.aja.com/html/support_kona3_swd.html
First I tested the RAID drive using the DVCPro HD 720p60 setting and a 512MB file size, I got a write speed of 75.7 MB/s and a read speed of 93.9. Using the 256MB file size, I got a write of 83.5 MB/s and a read of 93.1 MB/s.
I then tested the individual drives that were not striped together and the 512 file size had a write of 66.1 and a read of 75. The 256 has a write of 71.1 and a read of 74.2I decided to run the same tests using a 1080i60 setting and got the following results on the RAID drive:
256MB file size yielded a write of 90.6 MB/s and a read of 104.6. The 512MB file size yielded a write of 91.5 and a read of 104.3.
The NON-STRIPED drives yielded about the same as they had for the DVCPro HD setting, give or take a couple of MB/s.I hope this helps anyone researching the units that I bought. If I decide to stripe all 5 drives and do another test, if anyone is interested, I’ll post the speed test numbers.
Please keep in mind that these numbers are from brand-new EMPTY drives. Once there is data on these drives, the numbers are sure to decrease a bit.
??? If anyone has a suggestion on what software to use to strip 3-4 of the drives together as a RAID 0, I’d appreciate it.
Thanks!
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