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Ideal raid setup for uncompressed 1080p 8bit workflow in fcp.
Hows it going.
I am not going to go out and buy an external raid system, one of those you see for $$$$+, instead, I have an intel mac g5 system, and would like to build an internal raid which will perhaps be equivalent to an external raid system.
I basically only need 2-3 terabytes of space on my raid, I will be cutting a feature and doing effects on the same machine fyi.
What would be the best internal hardrives to put inside and build my own raid. SATA? ATA? Scuzzie is out of the question, right? Also I heard not to buy the internal drives from the apple store, regarding their failure expectations. Also how should I strike them? Raid 0, raid 5? How many internal drives, fill up the slots in the tower?
And assuming this is efficient for FCP to run uncompressed HD footage at 8 bit and 1920x1080p @ 24fps, this should be ideal for after effects as well correct?
I may already have the right answers but would like to confirm with some other pros out there before I go buy the cheapest drives I can find, and just want to make sure I do it right, and not by instinct.
Thanks so much.
Clint Nitkiewicz Hernandez
http://www.newelementproductions.com
Film-Maker/ Blu-ray Author/ Compositor -
10 Replies
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[Clint Nitkiewicz Hernandez] “I am not going to go out and buy an external raid system, one of those you see for $$$$+, instead, I have an intel mac g5 system, and would like to build an internal raid which will perhaps be equivalent to an external raid system.
I basically only need 2-3 terabytes of space on my raid, I will be cutting a feature and doing effects on the same machine fyi.”
Hey Clint, didn’t you used to be a Disreet Edit user?
In any case, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree for uncompressed HD. Three striped SATA drives may be just enough for a layer of 1080p video without dropping frames, however, by the time you add several tracks of audio and some effects, etc., you’re gonna in pretty deep doo doo.
You need sustained throughput of at least 240mbps at a bare minimum, and three drives striped together as raid-0 is only gonna give you like 180 or 200mbps completely empty, and even less as they get filled up. You’re gonna need to stripe 5 to eight drives for what you want. Sorry!!!
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Don’t say sorry, thats exactly the advice I need I suppose. But, I will not be doing any of my effects in FCP, I will be doing them mostly on a Flame, so just bringing the finished shots, the most I will be using in FCP is fade in/out or dissolves, which is obviously nothing.
“You need sustained throughput of at least at a bare minimum, and three drives striped together as raid-0 is only gonna give you like 180 or 200mbps completely empty, and even less as they get filled up. You’re gonna need to stripe 5 to eight drives for what you want”
This is what I want to hear, the tech stuff. So you mean striking 5 drives, and making sure each SATA drive I buy is at least 240mbps. Say I buy 5 240mbps SATA internal drives, after I stripe them, will they still be 240mbps? Or does striping them lower their mbps value?
Also should I go raid 0 or raid 5 for highest speed? I know one is safer than the other but one is faster than the other correct?
Clint Nitkiewicz Hernandez
http://www.newelementproductions.com
Film-Maker/ Blu-ray Author/ Compositor -
[Clint Nitkiewicz Hernandez] “This is what I want to hear, the tech stuff. So you mean striking 5 drives, and making sure each SATA drive I buy is at least 240mbps. Say I buy 5 240mbps SATA internal drives, after I stripe them, will they still be 240mbps? Or does striping them lower their mbps value?”
Whoopsee!!! I think you misunderstood something. Where did you get that SATA hard drives deliver 240mbps throughput?
A single SATA hard drive will deliver about 60 to 65mbps on average. Stripe three together and you’re lucky to get 200mbps empty.David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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Clint,
The numbers I was giving you are megabytes per second, which I probably should have written as mb/s rather than mbps which is megabits.
In any case, you need 5 to 8 drives striped.
And, yes throughput goes up as you stripe more drives together.
Keep in mind, the rated speed of hard drives such as 300mb/s is the internal speed of that drive, not the throughput it delivers when sending a signal through cables, a controller, and a data bus, which is like sending lots of water through a small pipe.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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“A single SATA hard drive will deliver about 60 to 65mbps on average. Stripe three together and you’re lucky to get 200mbps empty.”
I see, now the fog is clearing up. So that is why I see those $$$$ towers that have maybe 10 drives, so thats 60mbps x 12 drives = faster undisturbed realtime playback or = faster render times or both?
Oh no I wasn’t a discreet editor, I was looking into onlining onto a Smoke though, but decided to just do it on FCP.
But yeah so what does the more striped drives give you in the end? Please correct me if I am wrong below and or feel free to modify the list.
1. Protected Storage in case 1 drive fails
2. Faster Renders
3. Faster Previews in real timeSay I do get a separate $$$$ tower, or just go with the minimum built in my own tower, how do the programs utilize it? Say for Final Cut would I just start a project in a folder on that raid directory and all is good? Set my capture, renders, everything to that drive? Or do I have to install the program to the raid?
Clint Nitkiewicz Hernandez
http://www.newelementproductions.com
Film-Maker/ Blu-ray Author/ Compositor -
Okay, final post before bedtime…
Striping multiple drives as Raid-0 using Apple Disk Utility (a software raid) gives you a single large virtual drive with several times the throughput of a single drive.
A more expensive hardware raid controller will allow you to stripe more drives for even more throughput and will allow you to create a raid-5, which offers protection in case of failure that allows you to actually rebuild the raid while continuing to work if one or more drives fail. That’s why they cost so much.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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These are some of the least expensive products that will do uncompressed HD at RAID 5:
https://www.caldigit.com/HDPro.asp
https://www.dulcesystems.com/html/pro_dq.html
https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=58_78
There are other solutions, but these three companies have good reputations.
RAID 5 basically means one of the drives can fail in the set without any data loss. RAID 0 means if one drive fails, you have nothing.
If money is an issue, you might consider working with the ProRes codec in FCP. You won’t need as much storage, nor will that storage need to be so fast.
Before you start work, I highly recommend this DVD:
https://store.creativecow.net/p/63/getting_organized_in_final_cut_pro
It will save you time and money if you watch before you start post.
Tom
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[Clint Nitkiewicz Hernandez] “What would be the best internal hardrives to put inside and build my own raid. SATA? ATA? Scuzzie is out of the question, right? Also I heard not to buy the internal drives from the apple store, regarding their failure expectations. Also how should I strike them? Raid 0, raid 5? How many internal drives, fill up the slots in the tower?”
You can’t get enough speed from an internal array to cut 1080 uncompressed HD, you’ll need upwards of 250MB/s to sustain this. This requires at least a 5 drive array, 8 to 10 drives are better.
I run the MaxxDigital EVO HD series, we’re running the 8TB unit so we never run out of space. In RAID 5 we get upwards of 500MB/s so we have plenty of overhead to cut Uncompressed HD and 2K. RAID 5 gives us redundancy protection in case a drive in our array fails.
Ciprico, Sonnet and Dulce all make good units as well.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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“MaxxDigital EVO HD series”, I’ll check that brand out Walter thanks.
Clint Nitkiewicz Hernandez
http://www.newelementproductions.com
Film-Maker/ Blu-ray Author/ Compositor -
Hey Guys,
Due to some personal experience lately I thought I’d add 2 cents.I have a 2 Tb project. I have a raid 0 setup which gave me great speed. I also keep a set of external firewire drives and backup my raid system daily using syncro pro x. And it was great insurance. I have had the raid 0 setup fail/corrupted once due to a power outage and the drives needed to be reformatted. With the backup drives I was able to replace everything perfectly… and with a lot lower cost than a Raid 5 setup.
I’m also using one of the backup drives with space left to use when I playout the film as a QT Movie, which for me will be about 600 gigs. Then I’ll take that drive to the post house for finishing.
Hope it was some help.
Randy
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