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Can a SCSI Raid handle Uncompressed HD?
Hi all!
Long time lurker here in the ‘ol pasture; I’ve posted a few times, thankfully, so I’m not a complete troll, and once again I have a question for all of the awesome minds out there.My current system at my office is as follows:
Quad 2.5 PPC with 4.5GB of SDRAM
XServe RAID array (half full) with 3.5TB
FCP 5.1.4We’ve been doing a lot of HDV stuff here, and recently got a P2 project that went fairly smoothly. Now we have clients requesting HDCAM and I’m a little worried that the RAID we have won’t be adequate for the data throughput required (being only half full and, as I understand it, thus only using one of the fiber links).
My question is this: what kind of array will be fast enough to handle uncompressed HD? Is our current array good enough? Is a SCSI array capable of handling the load (which is what the boss wants to use for whatever reason)? If you could give your thoughts on this when you have some time to kill during renders or whatnot, that would be great! Thanks for all the help you guys and gals give! You’re all awesome!
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4 Replies
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Dan,
Your XServe is probably not capable of digitizing or playing back uncompressed without dropped frames. If you have a KOna or BM card you should run the speed test and see if you get anywahere close to sustained throughput needed which is 260Mb/sec.
Your boss is really living in the past in terms of his thinking regarding SCSI. SAS, which is a highbred of SATA and SCSI is the apex these days, but that’s both expesive and unnescessary. SATA at Raid-5 is what you want, and there are excellent offerings the will handle uncompressed HD from many of the mnaufacturers who advertise right here on the Cow: CalDigit, Maxx Digital, Dulce etc.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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go to the downloads section of aja’s website.
they have a free disk performance tool that will give you every answer you need. It does not
require an aja card to perform.I suspect though that if you were to post the show in
the DVCPRO-HD format instead of uncompressed and layback
to HDCAM that way, you would not have any problem at all.It’s a proven and reliable work flow in fcp.
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[Dan Melius] “XServe RAID array (half full) with 3.5TB”
My understanding is that only a fully populated XServe RAID can do Uncompressed HD.
[Dan Melius] “Is a SCSI array capable of handling the load”
Yes, with the proper setup, in your case it would be fully populating that array, which I’m not sure is cost effective vs. a SATA array or even a new Fibre Channel array.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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Thanks for all the help, guys! It is much appreciated; the work you guys do makes our collective post world a much better place 🙂
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