Fibre or SATA for Uncompressed

[Walter Biscardi]

[dave garcia] “On the Fibre end I’m looking at the Ciprico 4210. I can get 5TB for about $9k. It’s dual channel. I already have an apple quad 4gb fibre card that we got with the macpro thinking we’d be headed in that direction.”

Outstanding unit and if you go with Fibre Channel, this would be my recommendation along with Facilis. Ciprico and Facilis are definitely the leaders when it comes to Fibre Channel. We came very close to putting the 4210 in our shop recently.

[dave garcia] “On the other end I’m looking at the CalDigit HDPRO. It seems to be scalable fast and protected.”

I had three very bad experiences with CalDigit and their S2VR HD and Firewire VR units. I won’t use their products any longer. In fact they called me repeatedly to ask me to test this very unit you’re looking at, but I wouldn’t allow it.

We just installed two MaxxDigital Pro 8TB SAS/SATA units here in the shop and are extremely pleased with these. Bob Zelin actually referred me to the company as I had never heard of them. We can get up to 517MB/s on each unit in RAID 5 when they are optimized for Uncompressed HD. We’ve since re-set them to be optimized more for Compressed HD since we run predominately DVCPro HD and now we’re getting about 480MB/s on them. Still plenty of speed for Uncompressed HD.

We also tested Dulce and Sonnet when making our decision and both of those were good as well.

The big difference is that Dulce can build the RAID 5 in about 15 minutes. But what it’s doing is writing the parity information as you create each file, so you take a major speed hit down to around 250MB/s vs. the up to 480MB/s on the other units. Our Maxx units took about 6 hours to build the RAID 5, but once they’re set, they’re good to go.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Dave Garcia]

Thanks for the quick response Walter, and on labor day. You must be a workaholic as well.

This is fairly enlightening. One thing I still don’t quite understand is what would be the main reason for going Sata over Fibre or visa versa I’m assuming price.

Another question is this: Did you need to get the two units from Maxxdigital to achieve the speed. From what I’m understanding the speed on SATA theoretically could go up to 2GB/s if you keep adding arrays.

I really enjoyed the blog on having your studio redone by Bob Zelin by the way. It was very enlightening for a studio owner who is on what I would geuss would be a very similar hardware trajectory. Thanks for taking the time to share.

And thanks again for the input.

Dave Garcia
creative director
halflife* digital
Albuquerque, NM
http://www.halflifedigital.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[dave garcia] “This is fairly enlightening. One thing I still don’t quite understand is what would be the main reason for going Sata over Fibre or visa versa I’m assuming price.”

Price is really it. We strongly considered Fibre Channel as we have two primary edit suites that I was going to have run off shared storage. So Fibre Channel was the way to go there. But the cost for both the storage and the connectivity for the two systems was far more costly than the SATA options. In short I could get a lot more storage for less money going SATA. This has been a dramatic change over the past few months on how much large SATA arrays have dropped in price.

So I gave up the shared storage idea to save some money and get increased capacity at the same time.

[dave garcia] “Another question is this: Did you need to get the two units from Maxxdigital to achieve the speed. From what I’m understanding the speed on SATA theoretically could go up to 2GB/s if you keep adding arrays.”

We have one unit per suite for the two primary suites. My suite has 8TB of storage and the JungleLand suite has 8TB of storage. The speeds that I quoted are for each individual unit. Yes, speeds can increase if you were to stripe multiple units together, but I honestly don’t know what the limits are there. You’d have to talk to Atto as they make the Host Bus Adapter and they have a lot of information on the throughput limits.

[dave garcia] ”
Thanks for the quick response Walter, and on labor day. You must be a workaholic as well.”

Actually cleaning up our home office today, it’s a quiet day and I have the laptop open to the COW of course. 🙂

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[David Battistella]

I have a 4210. The thing is a tank. It is fast and it is Raid 3. So far I have had to replace three drives in the unit it is still under warranty.

The good news is that I have not had any data loss in that time. The bad news is that a new recent management decision has now prevented them from doing “cross shipment”

This is a giant pain in the but for people like us who can not afford to be down at all.

Back when things were HUGE and not CIPRICO, there was a policy to report a down drive. They then take a credit card imprint and ship you a new drive. This, of course allowed you to work away and wait for your drive. When it arrived you could install it and then run a reconstruct (all the while still working on with the unit) and put the bad drive back in the box and ship it back to CIPRICO.

The system had changed. You now how to ship them your drive and if you want a drive back quickly you have to pay for it on your own ticket, otherwise it’s a few days.

A formatted HUGE 4210 is about 2.9TB of safe storage. Backing that up is no easy task. and if you are ever down (even if you have not lost data) it hurts.

I think the new policy will affect my decision when I am looking for more storage. This is my second HUGE product, but with the CIPRICO changes (and frankly, dunce like decisions about changing cross shipping policies with existing customers) I am may to have to look to another manufacturer. SAS raid 6 looks interesting for sure.

I must say that Lance and Gerry and others I have dealt with at HUGE are really helpful and second to none, but sometimes management doesn’t respond the way the front liners do.

The drive is great, but when you drop that kind of change you really need to pick a company that is going to stick to the plan that you bought into, rather than evoke new polices to loyal legacy customers.

My two cents.

David

For what it is worth, HUGE are very sticky about the drives that they put into their arrays. I suspect that within about 18 months we will be seeing a lot of failure reporting on there forums of “less expensive” esata solutions. I can assure you that HUGE does put the drive through a very rigourous check and they fail many drives that end up in your firewire enclosures. Data is not to be messed with, it’s your whole business.

Peace and Love 🙂
Read my Blog
https://blogs.creativecow.net/DavidBattistella

[Walter Biscardi]

[David Battistella] “The bad news is that a new recent management decision has now prevented them from doing “cross shipment””

That’s terrible! I can’t believe that’s their policy now. Obviously a bean counter decision, not an engineering decision.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Dave Garcia]

Thanks again gentleman,

This has been very helpful.

David

David Garcia
creative director
halflife* digital
Albuquerque, NM
http://www.halflifedigital.com

[Lance Gropper]

Hello David:

You requested that we attempt to duplicate the data from the defective drive then return the duplicate. We can’t do that if we cross-ship a drive. Cross-shipping a drive was given to you as an option, but you declined it because you needed the data…

Lance Gropper
Ciprico

[David Battistella]

Lance,

I was refereing to the initial drive which was not cross shipped (due to the policy) not the drive that you shipped me previously that went down during the reconstruct.

For CLarity.

Drive 1 down: You cross ship
Drive 2 down: You cross ship
Drive 3 down: You do not cross ship
Drive 4 down(which is actiually drive 2 replacement): We can’t cross ship because I now have two drives down.

The point I was making in my post was about drive 3 not drive 1 or 2 and I hope you noticed that I have no issue with your service, just this policy which to me makes no sense.

David

Peace and Love 🙂
Read my Blog
https://blogs.creativecow.net/DavidBattistella

[Don Mcdonell]

Hello Dave,

I believe you’ve spoken to our tech support manager who informed you that we did have a brief change in policy with respect to cross shipping parts that has now been rescinded. Our company is growing rapidly and at times this can cause momentary glitches that are sometimes felt by loyal customers, but we came to our senses when we were reminded how much our good service reputation means, not only to our customers but to our company. We will do all we can going forward to ensure you and our other cusotmers are cared for in the manner to which they are accustomed.

Best regards,
Don McDonell
VP Sales and Marketing

[Don Mcdonell]

Hi Walter,

You’re a perceptive guy! Please see my response to Dave further down in this thread, where I say, “…we’ve come to our senses!” The cross ship program for disk drives is alive and well and is an important component of our respected service package.

Take care,
Don