1:1 Uncompressed

[Alex Alexzander]

I use a PCI-X Highpoint Rocket Raid controller, which has (at this time) 4x250GB SATAII drives attached. This is configured as RAID 0 stripe. Now Avid says when using OMFI to partition larger volumes such as this into smaller 200 – 250 GB partitions so that fewer files needed to be tracked in the OMFI database. After 10,000, the database can get a little lost.

Using this technique, I have benchmarked the first partition at over 200 MB/sec in write performance, and about the same in read performance. The last of these partitions benchmarks at about 170 MB/sec.

In any case, I can capture 1:1 without a problem on these partitions. Playback is perfect as well. One of the issues to look for is how well you have defined the system in terms of keeping the drive array on a separate PCI bus from the Mojo. If they are not separate, you’ll choke the system on ingest, and it will simply not be able to pull the data fast enough.

Try benchmarking you volumes as well. When I first built my array, I could not capture 1:1, and in fact, even simple DV had a problem. Turned out that my driver caused a strange problem where nothing on the volume could read or write faster than about 3 MB/sec, which even single drives can achieve in their sleep. Once that was resolved, the array could do over 200MB/sec.

So is the BUS a separate BUS from the Mojo?

Is the driver for the RAID card up to date?

Have you benchmarked the array to see if it is even capable of the speed you need?

Those are the things you need to know.

-Alex Alexzander