Best RAID drive for RAW Cimena DNG

[Shane Ross]

ESATA won’t cut it. Not even sure GIGe Ethernet is fast enough. Fibre might be. CalDigit HDOne or similar. But that’s a lot of money to throw at old tech.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[John Davidson]

Hey David, I have an extra ATTO R680 and a 24 TB 8 drive ProAvio RAID we no longer use just collecting dust. The RAID gets about 400-500 Mbps read/write speeds if I remember correctly. I’d be happy to discuss sending it to you to try out if you’d like.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Mitch Ives]

Promise Pegasus 2… with TB2… 800-900 in throughput…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill

[Shane Ross]

Mitch, he said Thunderbolt WAS NOT an option.

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[David Mathis]

Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter possible? Thanks for the input everyone.

[David Roth weiss]

If it were possible, you would be getting approximately 90MB/sec max over Ethernet from a RAID array capable of 1000MB/sec. Probably not your best use of resources.

A SAS connected 8-drive RAID such as the one John has offered you is your best bet.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Bob Zelin]

your real question is “what is the cheapest way I can do this”.
John Davidson’s offer is the best offer you are going to get, if price is the main consideration. You need a REAL RAID array, with a REAL disk drive host adaptor (cost over $900 for the card), and a minimum of 8 disk drives. I don’t care what brand you get – those are your specs for your Mac Pro to accomplish what you want.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Oliver Peters]

Are planning to edit directly with the raw DNG files? Generally that’s not recommended. Also X doesn’t interpret the raw information. It just imports the clips with baked info – sometimes with incorrect levels. Have you looked into using Resolve in a workflow to render the clips into MOVs?

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[David Mathis]

I plan to render out proxies from Resolve first, edit in FCP X then back to Resolve first. Will apply a LUT as well. Going to use the workflow as Denver Riddle uses.

I am an avid user of FCP X!

[Chris Kenny]

[David Mathis] “I currently own a Blackmagic Cinema Camera and looking for a reasonably priced storage solution. I mainly shoot in the RAW format. Considering a RAID drive, looking for advice on enclosure and drives. I have the old school Mac Pro so thunderbolt connection is not an option at this time. Is it possible to go with Ethernet or would another connection be a better option? Any advice is greatly appreciated.”

This is the 2.5K camera? I don’t know why you’re getting all these responses about needing 8+ drives. This isn’t uncompressed 16-bit 4K DPX or something, it’s 2.5K raw. It’s only about 120 MB/s — a single 7200 RPM drive will do that, though not solidly enough to rely on. Your cheapest option on an old Mac Pro would be to get a USB 3 or eSATA card, a dual drive enclosure, and a couple of 7200 RPM drives, and run the thing RAID 0 (this would work, by the numbers, though I haven’t used that particular model). Of course, you’d want to keep really good backups of footage and probably store project files, etc. somewhere else with RAID 0, since you’d lose everything if either drive died.

You could also just use Disk Utility to set up software RAID 0 across two or three internal drives, if all your footage will fit into that sort of storage space.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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