Best Drive solution?

[Jerry Hofmann]

AJA has a cool app downloadable from them to figure out storage space requirements for all formats… it’s in the Kona 2 support page… https://www.aja.com/support_kona.html look toward the bottom of the page.

External SATA arrays will handle uncompressed 10 bit NTSC or PAL, however they aren’t going to be fast enough for useful storage of HD uncompressed, that would take at least a dual channel SCSI array. 4 gig Fibre would be better and folks like Huge Systems are getting ready to release 4 Gig Fibre solutions that will be the defacto standard I’d think very soon. They showed pre release hardware at NAB that could sustain 500 mb/sec… that’s enough for 3 streams of uncompressed HD… fastest SCSI is about half that.

If you only need DVCPROHD captured material (via firewire for example) you can use much less expensive disk storage… in fact a fast FW 800 drive will suffice for it. it’s data rates are larger than DV, but at most a 1080i 60 DVCPRO native capture is only 13.7mb/sec… the 720 native codecs are even smaller. HD uncompressed can be well over 100mb/sec…

Jerry

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Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[Mitchji]

[Jerry Hofmann] “External SATA arrays will handle uncompressed 10 bit NTSC or PAL, however they aren’t going to be fast enough for useful storage of HD uncompressed, that would take at least a dual channel SCSI array.”

Hi Jerry,

HDCAM is not uncompressed but these results and the opinion sound promising:
https://www.lafcpug.org/Tutorials/basic_storage_soltz.html
Excerpt:
“Below are benchmarks for this 4 drive raid using AJA’s Test Utility and the eSata8 card. The Tempo 4×4 card returned similar results. My own tests have given me 6 layers of realtime in DVCPRO HD 720p from footage captured from the Varicam as well as the ability to playback 8-bit 1080i HD. Granted this is from footage which was supplied to me and not captured on this system form HDCAM deck. It also was tested on a relatively empty drive. I would not recommend 8-bit uncompressed HD on this configuration. Based upon these benchmarks for a 4-drive raid, I do believe that an 8-drive raid would handle HDCAM.”

Best Wishes,

Mitch