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Firewire Storage
Is anyone using a Firewire RAID with the Kona2? Will this work ok for 8 bit uncompressed and DVCPro HD?
Thanks,
TimTim Langston
Cryin’ Out Loud Productions
Fort Wayne, IN
http://www.colproductions.com -
17 Replies
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for DVCPRO HD and SD uncompressed 8 bit, your overhead is about 20MB/sec and i use both the superbigdisk and the g-raid. works great for one stream or so…as you fill these raid drives up, they get slow, so what you see in the first 20% of capacity is nothing like the slowdown you see at 80% capacity.
720 8 bit uncompressed is 110 mb/second which is fairly impossible with a fw 800 raid.
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Yeah, forget Firewire or even FW800… go with SATA. I can’t recommend SATA enough. It has nothing but pluses going for it.
Marco Solorio | OneRiver Media
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Who’s good and who’s not so good?
I’m running 14 160 SCSI Ultras, they’re getting old….I have to restart two or three times just to get them all running. YIKES! I’m backing them up to a 800 gig firewire drive now. Come Monday I have to make a decision and spend some cash.
Appreciate any and all help,
TimTim Langston
Cryin’ Out Loud Productions
Fort Wayne, IN
http://www.colproductions.com -
FW800 RAIDs were great in the beginning (i.e., prior to SATA RAIDs), but at a relative 800 Mb/s, they do have their bottleneck… no matter how many drives you through into the RAID. It is relatively cheap, but quite limiting.
SATA on the other hand will get faster and faster as you stuff more drives into the SATA case, granted of course that you have the physical room and ports to do it. SATA costs just marginally more than FW800, well, at least building one. I’ve built both FW800 RAIDs and SATA RAIDs here for my facility and the SATA RAID did cost a little more, but is still extremely cheap in the whole scheme of things.
With a 4-disk SATA RAID, I can get about 200+ MB/s. Uncompressed HD? Not a problem. It jumps up even more with an 8-disk setup. I haven’t used SCSI since my first SATA setup and haven’t looked back since. No more finicky SCSI drives mounting and such. SCSI is totally dead IMO.
If you’re a competent builder of custom computer hardware, then you can save some serious cash by building your own SATA RAID. I like to build mine with a ton of fans in it; fans are cheap and lengthens the longevity of the drives. I think I have 22 fans on one 4-drive unit! Or you can buy a pre-built system from the likes of Promax and such.
IMO, an X RAID is only good if you need FC to keep your RAID far away from your CPU or if you fill up the entire unit with drives (and we all know how much THAT costs!). If an X RAID is only partially full, you’re not going to get the full potential of the system. With SATA, you start off cheap and instantly have killer throughput rates… even a 2-disk SATA RAID can give very respectable data rates and at a cost that’s laughable.
SATA, SATA, SATA… I can’t recommend it enough.
Marco Solorio | OneRiver Media
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so what do you do with sata when you need raid protection or to expand? Fibre! Fibre! Fibre! 4Gb Fibre!
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With Marco on this one. SATA has been the solution for a while, although SCSI isn’t entirely out of the picture you can’t beat SATA for space and thruput. RAID is not a problem given you have enough disks.
Just to put things in perspective:
Just a few months ago it took 24 drives to give us the thruput for RGB in RAID, we are getting ready to release a 8 drive system that will do it(IN RAID). (We have been aware of this change for quiet awhile and have been counting the days).
You can expand with SATA if it’s planned out and yes Fiber is ALWAYS a good choice.
Cheers,
Ramona -
The only major drawback I see to Sata when using internal drives within a G5 with a SATA PCI control card are the cheap connectors. They are easy to break pins on the drive itself or the plastic connector itself if the drives are jarred or move.
This occured to me on a G5 with three internal drives mounted onto a third party mounting system not endorsed by Apple. The allen screws got loose in transport and the drives ended stacking up against themselves which caused the SATA connectors to break.
However even with two of the drives down I was able to work with a two drive raid with no problems dealing with native dvcpro HD at 720P.
Tony Salgado
Tony Salgado
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Any controller better than another? How about drives? What about the 500GB Hitachi 7K500 7200RPM SATA 3.5 drives?
Tim
Tim Langston
Cryin’ Out Loud Productions
Fort Wayne, IN
http://www.colproductions.com -
i’d wait for the 500GB seagate myself, i think that should prove better for a myriad of reasons i could extrapolate on when it ships…but mostly on finer points…if you are putting something together in large part because of low cost, hitachi is not too bad.
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Reading through this thread, there’s a couple of points I’d like to add for Tim.
I’m a huge fan of Seagate Barracuda drives. I’d absolutely recommend them for your main RAID setup if you’re building one yourself. I prefer them so much, I’ve bought them for my boot drives as well on some systems.
I personally wouldn’t build an internal RAID setup in the G5. There’s so much heat that’s already built up in there by the CPUs and such, let alone the heat the drives will generate alone. Heat are drives’ biggest killer and diminishes their life-span. Go external where you can control the heat in the enclosure with a ton of fans.
Get an (external) 8-port PCI-X SATA card so you can add drives later. Buy good cables and DO NOT use internal cables externally.
If you don’t feel 100% comfortable building your own SATA RAID, either have a pro build one for you or buy a pre-built system from Promax or the like.
Lastly, put your seatbelt on… you’re going to get some insane disk speeds!
Marco Solorio | OneRiver Media
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