(3) 750 Barracuda drive raid

[Bob Zelin]

they will work just fine, and you will get more than 120mb/sec, but less than 170mb/sec – which means you will be able to do everything except uncompressed 8 and 10 bit HD-SDI.
8 and 10 bit SDI, and DVCProHD will work just fine.

Bob

[Jean-yves Le moine]

to do uncompressed hd 8 and 10 bit you need 4 drives
put your system on an ata drive on the dvd bus

jean-yves le moine

temps r

[Art Guglielmo]

Humm, thats a good idea. Also, is there a nice enclosure to put 4 of these drives in an external SATA box? And will that give me uncompressed bandwith ?

[Fred Connors jr.]

You don’t need an enclosure, you have 4 SATA slots in you Mac Pro.

Get a 250GB ATA drive and put it on the ATA bus, mounted it in the second optical drive bay. Use this drive as your start up OS and Applications drive, it will be fine. Now you have four open SATA slots for the 750GB drives. Please note that these drives must have the newest firmware installed.
See https://www.barefeats.com/quad07.html

Fred

[Fergus Hammond]

Personally, I wouldn’t do this. Apple has a tendency to mess with people who’ve got odd hardware configurations (e.g., an OS update is released which breaks your system). Also, with five hard drives in the computer, it’s definitely going to be warm inside. Not enough to cause any harm, I’m sure, but warm enough to make your computer louder (thanks to the fan – particularly the one on the video card – spinning faster).

I would buy an external SATA enclosure. After reading many reviews (the ones on AMUG’s site are great) and seeing the product in person at NAB, I got one of these:

https://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-2eEN4/

I paired it with one of these:

https://www.sonnettech.com/product/tempo_sata_e4p.html

The combination has been great. I get about 250 MB/second read and write. The enclosure is very quiet – about the same as my old G5 – and it works well with the new Mac Pro. There’s no redundancy, of course, which is why a “real” array from someone like Huge is appealing but it’s cheap, quiet and fast.

[Bob Zelin]

this is not accurate information. 4 drives striped RAID 0 is NOT FAST ENOUGH to do RELIABLE uncompressed 8 or 10 bit HD-SDI. I have not tried the Cal Digit chassis that claims that they can do this, but I use Sonnet products all day long, and with 5 Hitachi or Seagate SATA II drives in the Fusion 500P chassis, with the Sonnet E4P, you are LUCKY if you can get PLAYBACK of 8 bit uncompressed HD-SDI – but you will not be able to write 8 bit HD-SDI to this chassis – it is too slow. (we got the playback to work by copying files from another array – it worked, but on the edge). You will NEVER get 10 bit uncompressed HD-SDI to work with 4 or 5 drives (again, I have not tried the Cal Digit).

HOWEVER, it is very easy, and relatively inexpensive (about $2500 more) to get another loaded Fusion 500 Chassis with another 2.5 Terabytes, and stick that into another port on the SATA card. With TEN DRIVES, there is no problem doing this, all stripped RAID 0.

There is a big difference between “barely getting it to work” and reliable playback for a real job with layers of video, titles, effects, etc.

Bob Zelin

[Trish From caldigit]

Hi Bob,

The CalDigit Team just read your post; if you would like to test out CalDigit