Drive Performance

[Walter Biscardi]

[Dylan Reeve] “I would be very grateful if some people could post Xbench drive benchmark results for different known-good drive configurations, so I can get an idea of how ours are stacking up.”

Drive speed is not the only thing to look at. Block allocation is a bit thing too that I learned from ATTO. Even though a drive array can be putting out 300 – 500 MB/s it could drop frames with something as simple as DV playback.

When we set up our array in RAID 5 the first thing ATTO asked me was if we wanted to maximize playback for all uncompressed material or compressed material. You can set up the block allocation differently to maximize playback for either. I had honestly never heard of this until last year. So we set up everything for compressed playback as right now our work rarely involves uncompressed HD.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Dylan Reeve]

This is something I have considered – the default allocation block in Apple’s HFS+ file system it 4KB, which is good for making sure small files don’t take up lots of space, but not so good for read/write efficiency with large files.