Daisy Chained drives and FCP

[Michael Nease]

Hi Seth,

It sounds like your hard drives might be spinning down when they’re not in use. What this means is that every time you reach a point in your timeline that needs to access footage from a different drive, if that drive hasn’t been used in a while it may have spun down and needs to spin back up in order to get to your footage. This might be the cause of your lag.

If you haven’t done so already, go to System Preferences>Energy Saver and make sure “Put The Hard Disc(s) to sleep when possible” is not checked.

If that’s the case, you might want to consider a larger shared storage option so you can keep all the footage essentially in one place.

I hope this helps!

Michael Nease
Firebare Productions
http://www.firebare.com
Los Angeles, CA

[Alan Okey]

You don’t need a new computer, you need media drives that don’t suck. That rules out Firewire drives, which are totally amateur hour. Take the plunge and get a real RAID:

https://www.caldigit.com/HDElement/

https://www.caldigit.com/HDOne/

https://www.CalDigit.com/HDPro/

Read this thread:

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/228/686

Excerpt:

The HD Element is a RAID 5 array package that is expandable, and is the CHEAPEST professional configuration on the market today. This means that no one has any excuse to not have a SAS/SATA RAID 5 configuration any longer for their professional editing or graphics workstation.

-Bob Zelin

I’m guessing that your current storage has no fault tolerance/redundancy, which means that if you lose a drive, you’re in a world of hurt – or at the very least, you’re in for a lot of recapturing.

There’s no good excuse to rely on cheap external drives for video storage when there are great, affordable solutions that provide excellent performance and redundancy.

[Seth Keal]

The drives I have now are duplicate drives from a gsafe housing and they are sata drives that are in Mercury Elite Pro casings, which have eSATA ports. I’m not in fear of losing anything, because I have an exact replica in storage of the drives and I haven’t digitized anything because I’m using MXF4mac.
I have no way of plugging the eSATA cables in the computer and I don’t know if you can daisy chain these drives via eSATA. But I’ve read the benefit of using eSATA as opposed to firewire 800 is negligible.

I haven’t really looked into what you have recommended, but can I pull my drives out of their casings and plug them into the HD element?

[Alan Okey]

Regarding Firewire 800 vs. eSATA:

https://www.barefeats.com/hard51.html

Excerpt:

“The main key to the speed advantage of Serial ATA is that each drive not only has a dedicated port but each port represents a dedicated data channel capable of 150 to 300MB/s, depending on the host adapter used.

With FireWire 800, the drives are typically daisy changed on the same 100MB/s data channel. Even if you install a FireWire 800 PCI card with 4 ports, those four ports share the same 100MB/s data channel — as if they were daisy chained. It would take three PCI cards plus built-in FireWire 800 to equal four data channels.”

As for the HDElement, it is shipped as a turnkey product. It must be purchased fully populated and does not support third party hard drives. However, you are assured of exhaustive QC testing and full warranty support from a single vendor in the event of any problems.

[Richard Sanchez]

I would highly recommend an HD Element for your work. I work with DVCPRO HD and Pro Res very frequently, and the HD Element works like a champ. Also, Cal Digit has excellent customer support. The only thing is, I don’t know if they have a PCI-X version of their RAID card, which is necessary for the HD Element.

Richard Sanchez
North Hollywood, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[Jared Picune]

Unforturentrly the CalDigit RAID Card is only PCIe. The HDOne, HDPro, and CalDigit VR can all be used in PCI-x machines though.

Jared Picune
CalDigit. Serious Storage.Denver Final Cut Pro UG
Geeky Mac | FCP Tips & Tricks

[James Carter]

hmm interesting.

[Jason Levy]

One thing to remember is that just because your system has free memory does not mean that FCP is not running out of memory – there is a limit to how much it can use regardless of how many gigs you have installed. (2 gigs is it?)

It’s important to make sure that your projects stay small. Everything in your project takes space – don’t have anything in there that you don’t need. If you have a lot of old versions of your sequences keep them in a secondary project. If there is stuff like stock shots or stock music that you can get right from the finder don’t keep it in the project.

It does sound like your drives are too slow… but that doesn’t explain the out of memory problem.. your projects may be bloated too.. keep them slim if you can.