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Are 2 drives striped enough for SD 10bit /RAID 3/5 drive solutions?
Hi guys,
Buying a new MacPro with FCP. I’m still stuck on the storage solution. My budget is around $2-2.5K for 1Tb but I want some kind of RAID backup.I would prefer SATA drives with SATA connection but so far all I have found is RAID 1+0 solutions, which means a 5 drive enclosure effectively uses only 2 drives for playback. Is anyone using two drives striped together to playback up to 10bit SD uncompressed. My other work is 1080/25 DVCProHD.
I’d appreciate any insight into the above and any solutions others are using with RAID backup.
Regards,
Steve -
8 Replies
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Look to the left of the page for Search Posts and do a search first. There have been hundreds of posts about
SATA drives and HD work. Come back and ask any questions not answered many times before.
Ed -
2 drives striped together is definitely enough for 10 bit uncompressed SD, but you won’t have Raid3 at that point, you will have raid0 (no protection on raid0). If you need raid 3 check out ciprico (they cost more than you want to spend). SATA Raids offer minimal protection. Pony up for a nice raid and you won’t be disappointed. There are other raid manufacturers out there such as Medea (now Avid), G-Tech has a new fibre raid out, and countless others.
Jeremy
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Ed,
I did a search numerous times and could not really find the exact info that I was asking for. If you find the links please post send them to me.. much appreciated.Jeremy,
Yes, I’ve looked at the RAID3/5 scenario as I must have some kind of backup.Unfortunately, they’re all more than $2K. The G-RAID Pro’s are perfect price-wise with RAID 3 protection except they use FW800 which I don’t feel is a good move since it saturates the FW bus pretty much non stop.
What I came up with was a S2VR HD RAID 1 + 0 solution … ie. 2 drives mirrored then striped, with a hot swappable spare. I realise I am wasting a lot of my drive space to get protection at the expense of throughput, ie. from 5 drives I am getting only two for throughput (about 120-130Mbps). Does that seem realistic?
Alternatively, The Fibrenetix FX606-U4 is a SATA drive setup with SCSI connection in RAID 3.However I have no real world specs on the throughput of these. Anyone else using them?
Else, as you mentioned, I need to really spend quite a bit more and look at RAID3/5 with eithere SCSI or FC4 connections.
Feedback appreciated.
Regards,
Steve -
[steve997] “What I came up with was a S2VR HD RAID 1 + 0 solution”
This will be slower than 1 drive. Raid1 requires a lot of overhead as it’s writing identical information to each drive.
if you need to run 10bit uncompressed SD, than you need at least 2 drives RAID0. Sorry man, thems the brakes. DOn’t look at GTech’s Graid Pro, look at GSpeed. It’s brand new and available in Fibre or Scsi (i recommend fibre)
I don’t know anything about Fibrenetix.
$2,000 can get you a lot of SATA storage, but it won’t be protected. I bit the bullet and got myself a Huge Systems 4105 and have not looked back.
Many people have good luck running RAID 0 with SATA on this forum, maybe you will too.
Jeremy
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[JeremyG] “if you need to run 10bit uncompressed SD, than you need at least 2 drives RAID0”
Yes, but that is the bare mininum. Add just a few sound tracks and a dissolve and you’re already looking at a red stripe and a render just to avoid hearing the beeps. For anything other than the simplist 10-bit editing you really need four drives striped at Raid0 to have good RT performance.
And, I’m running Raid0 sucessfully with no backup, but I did have a brand new Hitachi 500gb drive fail on me three days after I set up new 2tb stripe set. Thankfully I had not yet erased any of the media from my other 1tb array, so it wasn’t a problem for me. After getting a replacement drive all has been good ever since. I think it was just bad luck and that I stumbled upon the one bad apple in the barrel, cuz no one else I know who bought the Hitachi drives has had a problem.
DRW
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Steve,
Didn’t mean to jump on you with the “search the posts”. It’s a pet peeve of mine here that most people
don’t do a search before asking the same questions over and over again. There are a number of threads
related to your question, although no one of them may answer all parts of your question. If you do a RAID5
or RAID3 search in all the high end work forums, you’re bound to get more info (along with the answers
you’ve already gotten here). RAID5 seems to be the preferred option for video, and doesn’t penalize you too much
on space. Definitely go at least 4 drives, in my humble opinion.
Here’s a thread that may help with some of your question:
https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/new_read_post.cgi?forumid=98&postid=857070
Ed[steve997] “Ed,
I did a search numerous times and could not really find the exact info that I was asking for. If you find the links please post send them to me.. much appreciated.” -
Hi Steve,
I saw this thread and thought you may want to hear for one of the manufactures.
Medea offers a range of products of both Raid0 and Raid3 SCSI and Fibre solutions. The product you would be most interested in based on your need for protection is a product called the RTR320. This is a 5 dive SCSI Raid3 array built on an Ultra 320 controller. It has a sustained rate (from the front of the drive to the back of the drive) of 160 MB/Sec and burst rates over 200 MB/Sec. You get the capacity of 4 drives while one drive is dedicated data protection. With our array you can lose one drive and not lose your data or data rate which allows you to continue to edit. A lot of manufactures offer similar solutions but with a drive shutdown the performance comes to a crawl. Our array also offers MST (Multi Stream Technology) which is RAM caching system that aids in performance. A single 5 drive array is capable of 4 layers of 10 Bit SD or 4 layers of DVCPR0HD in real time.
As someone else mentioned there are other solutions out there that may be outside of the budget you specified. I would like the opportunity to speak with you directly and see if we can work something out. I can be reached at 888-296-3332 x109.
Mike Schuyler
Medea Corp -
Ed,
No offence taken (I know what you mean)…
Thanks for that link… missed that one.
Cheers,
steve
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