Buying new Xraid

[Kaspar Kallas]

It would seem the only way to use Xraid for RGB 1080 50i format would be to use sheer video codec?

-Kaspar

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Kaspar –
I have no personal experience with this, and I am probably wrong about this, but I believe that I have read that you would need 2 FC cards and 2 Xserve RAID chassis striped together to get the performance necessary to get uncompressed 4:4:4 for large file playback (a half hour show, for example). But this is something that I read from another user forum, so I don’t know how accurate this info is.

Bob Zelin

[Phil]

You should look at other options. I know people were using 2 fc cards and 2 raids for 2K but depending on the amount of storage you may be better off with a scsi setup. My ULD4d with 8 10k’s get 340/335 80% full. Our xserve raids would have some problems writing the 210+ mb/s you need as the drives fill.

[Steve Connor]

New 4K fibre channel Huge Raids look good!

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

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[Bob Zelin]

HUGE Raid’s are amazing. I don’t deal with dual link, and I am a huge SATA fan, but whenever I have a customer that needs to do uncompressed 10 bit HD (4:2:2), I ALWAYS specify the HUGE U320-RX. I am sure that the 4k fibre HUGE arrays are teriffic.
I am not an XServe RAID fan, from experience. This does not mean that the product does not work.

Bob Zelin

[Kaspar Kallas]

The thing is that I need some financing help when I am going to bui an FC Raid Array,
So I am back @ sq 1 – basically have 2 x external 8 port sata raid0 and have that mirrored to raid 10
Drawbacks would be on 2TB less possible storage and no sata cards for PCIe @ the moment.

-Kaspar

[Phil]

Anyone know if the pci-e fibre card from apple is 4 gig or 2 gig?

[Steve Connor]

2 gig

Steve Connor
Cardinal HD

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[Bob Zelin]

come on Kaspar, you are driving us crazy here – there may not be a PCIe SATA card, but there isn’t a Blackmagic PCIe HD card either (to my knowlege) – it’s the Blackmagic Decklink Extreme only for now. And that doesn’t to HD – certainly not 4:4:4 HD !

But be assured that Blackmagic (and the SATA companies) will have PCIe cards coming out SOON. In the meantime, a single Sonnet Tempo eSATA 8 port card can handle 4 Terabytes of storage, and you can use TWO cards in the MAC, so you can have a 4 Terabyte mirrored situation if you like. That’s still a lot of storage (and it’s still a lot of money !).

Bob Zelin

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Kasper,

A single Xserve RAID is not enough for 4:4:4 HD. We see about 230 MB/sec read and write when we stripe each array of 7 disks as RAID 0 and then stripe across both channels. This is a good speed for HD 4:2:2 but is insufficient for HD 4:4:4.

Disk arrays for HD 4:4:4 include 4GB Fibre Channel disk arrays from Huge Systems or Medea or you can build your own from 8 U320 SCSI Cheetah disks running at 10,000 rpm and place them in a U320 SCSI JBOD. I have personally found wiring up the JBOD to be particularly frustrating and just love the prebuilt disk arrays from Huge Systems as they are very fast and suitable for this purpose.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design