A few Kona 3 Questions

[Walter Biscardi]

[Erik Lindahl] “1. Does the Kona 3 offer a better “video desktop” experience? The Kona LHe is quite sluggish in this regard and perhaps the future is more promosing for Kona 3 here

[Bob Zelin]

your problem is with your drives, or crap loaded on your computer. The Kona 3 will NOT perform better than the Kona LHe (but it will give you upconversion).

Crappy drives give you crappy performance. Run AJA Kona System Test now. If you dont’ get over 170mb/sec on whatever drives you are running, stop complaining, and change your drive arrays.

I use the Kona 3 for AE realtime outputs all day long, and it works just fine.

The Kona 3 is not a miracle product, if your drives are full.
If you own Lacie drives, well, you are on your own.

Bob Zelin

[Brian Tetamore]

Follow up on drives as I’m close to upgrading to producing more HD projects. I currently have a 1TB SATA drive array. I realize money plays a factor, but what drive arrays do you recommend?

70% of our projects are done in 8bit uncompressed
30% of our projects are done in DVCProHD 1080i60 or 720

Obviously, the later is painstakingly slow as we still just have a G5 Dual 2.7

Thanks in advance.

[Bob Zelin]

If money is really an issue, you can get away with FW800 drives (like from G-Tech, etc.). If you have a little more money, you can get an “old school” (2 year old technology) SATA port multipier product for PCI-X from Cal Digit, Sonnet, Dulce, Firmtek, etc. This will give you much better performance. A better investment for new systems are the newer RAID 5 SATA arrays, but since you have a PCI-X based MAC, you can’t get these for your system. When you upgrade to a newer PCI-E based MAC, you simply get a PCI-E SATA port multipler card for your MAC, and continue to use your drive array.

But if money is the only issue, you can continue with FW800 for what you are doing.

Bob Zelin

[Colin Mcquillan]

Hey Bob, read your review on the S2VR HD you wrote back in Jan. It might be the way I go for in a new suite:
Macpro octo (8 gig ram)
2X23″ACD
Kona LHe with breakout box
S2VR HD

Are you still liking the S2VR HD or have you seen anything else similar in price and performance spike your interest? How about the G-SPEED eS?

Caldigit S2VR HD VS G-Tech’s G-SPEED eS

Any thoughts?

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver BC

[Walter Biscardi]

[Colin McQ] “Caldigit S2VR HD VS G-Tech’s G-SPEED eS”

Gary Adcock’s honestly the only person I know of who runs the GSpeed but he loves it.

I had three S2VR HD’s fail on me in less than 6 months. I was a huge fan of them at first, but obviously this performance soured me on them.

We now run 8TB SAS/SATA arrays from Maxx Digital which top out around 460MB/s in RAID 5.

We also have two LaCie S2S 1.25 TB SATA Arrays that have been a workhorse for over 2 years now on various sytems.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Gary Adcock]

[Colin McQ] “How about the G-SPEED eS? “

as walter said, I do like my Gspeed ES unit.

I prefer Fibre over Sata do to the mass connectivity in my office- FIbre allows me to plug in any array to my Q-logic switch and instantly see it over the network- a plus when you see as many storage solutions as I do.

I am currently awaiting a demo unit from Dulce ( SAS based) and I also have a test unit arriving later in November from Ciprico. I have not tested the Caldigit or Sonnett solutions.

SATA is great if it is only one machine- it is nearly impossible to share a Sata array across multiple computers, hense the reason I use fibre.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

[Bob Zelin]

I don’t like Gary’s response (no offense Gary).
Gary’s response suggests that you purchase a QLogic Fibre Switch, plug all your fibre workstations into it (along with
your Fibre array), and VOILA, everyone sees everything including the storage, just like a simple ethernet network. It does not work this way, and requires system configuration and operation of a SAN solution – anything from XSAN to MetaSan, and countless others. You just don’t “plug in” and all of a sudden, you “instantly” see it. SATA and Fibre are just disk drive arrays, and without a solution that allows you to share, you just don’t get to plug in and share efficiently.

Bob Zelin

[Colin Mcquillan]

Hi Guys,, thanks for all the response,

Fiber would be great,, but this particular unit is for a suite that will live in my den and the SATA raid will only be used on the one station. Might lug the system out to the truck for a few broadcasts here and there, but will mainly live at home.

For cost/performance, I’ve narrowed my search to the two units i’ve listed above. The S2VR HD and the GSPEED eS
The more I read… the more I like the GSPEED… According to them you can get write speeds up to 560MBs and read speeds over 600MB/s!! (with 4 units striped together in raid 0.) Is this possible with the S2VR? Couldn’t find anything on this on the caldigit site…

GSPEED eS is capable of RAID 0,1,5,10,JBOD, S2VR HD is RAID 0,1, JBOD

GSPEEDes is a bit cheeper than the S2VR HD.

I know of Walter’s experience with the S2VR HD, although I have read many good things about it too! (Really!?! you had 3 units go south on you?!?)
On the other hand the GSPEEDeS is new,, and I cant find any solid reviews on it,, and don’t know anyone who has tested one…

Are there other units in this range I may have missed that contend with these two?

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver BC

[Colin Mcquillan]

oh snap!

Sorry Bob,, I may have accidentally rated your post… low… I was going for a tab in my browser and had a premature click… The “Rate This Post” was right there…. I tried to give you 5 cows after,,, but it wont let me 🙁

Anyone reading,, could you help me out! Give bob some cows for his post just above!!

Cheers,

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver BC