Hardware Suggestions: External RAID-5 for Final Cut Studio 5.1 with AJA Kona 3

[Walter Biscardi]

[burkewood] “I really am looking for something that can give me RAID-5”

Then look at Fibre Channel solutions and look at Ciprico. Great products and great support.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Brian Deviteri]

Yeah, the CalDigit solution is not going to cut it for my needs – RAID-5 (unsupported) and the demands for uncompressed just far exceed the bandwidth capacity of the equipment.

DVCPRO HD (4:2:2) at 1080/60i (1280×1080) and 720/60p (960×720) is 12.50MB/s (100Mb/s)

Uncompressed HD-SDI 10bit RGB 4:4:4 (1920×1080) is 237.50MB/s (1900Mb/s)

[Brian Deviteri]

Originally I was hoping that I could get away with a SATA solution, but so far the only thing that comes close in terms of performance is the CalDigit HD444 which does not support RAID-5. I’m definitely going to be looking into Fibre Channel solutions a bit more.

I truly appreciate all your help and suggestions.

[Shane Ross]

[burkewood] “and the demands for uncompressed just far exceed the bandwidth capacity of the equipment.”

I’ll agree about the Raid 5 comment, but not about what you said above. The CalDigit 4:4:4 unit is capable of 450MB/s…more than enough for uncompressed HD.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[John Foley]

Let me introduce you to another product that will do what you require and is very cost effective.

This is a SATA RAID system with hardware settable RAID levels of 0,1,5 and 10. When installed, MacOS X sees them as one volume. You can choose any disk configuration up to 3.0 TB of 750 GB disks in a 4 stripe RAID configuration that will give you up to 240 MB/sec when configured as RAID 0.

Please check this out at http://www.thefinalcutstore.com – Storage- SATA RAID Systems – ExtRAID

Thank You for taking a look at what is offered.

[Brian Deviteri]

Very true, I totally agree. I just thought we were referencing the S2VR, which cannot do 4:4:4. The S2VR-HD is 230 MB/s and the S2VR-Duo is 150 MB/s. The HD444 is 450 MB/s, but still unable to do RAID-5.

Again, I truly appreciate all the suggestions.

[Walter Biscardi]

[burkewood] “and the demands for uncompressed just far exceed the bandwidth capacity of the equipment.”

Uncompressed 4:2:2 HD IS supported by the S2VR HD. We’ve captured, edited 8bit uncompressed no problems here.

Uncompressed 4:4:4 HD IS supported by the 4:4:4 HD model.

It’s just the RAID 5 that CalDigit does not support.

[burkewood] “DVCPRO HD (4:2:2) at 1080/60i (1280×1080) and 720/60p (960×720) is 12.50MB/s (100Mb/s)”

Ok, that’s 12.5MB/s or 100Mbps (as in Megabits, not MegaBytes). You can run this off a single Firewire 400 drive if you wanted to, we already explained that. DVCPro HD is even smaller than 8 and 10bit SD. those are 20 and 40MB/s respectively. This is a very very small format to push through a drive.

If someone told you DVCPro HD is a huge format to work with, you got bad information. We’ve been cutting DVCPro HD going on three years now.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Brian Deviteri]

I appreciate the suggestion, but how does this SATA RAID really differ from the SATA RAIDs that were mentioned before from CalDigit? Performance wise, the HD444 is still looking like the “BEST” SATA solution (https://www.caldigit.com/HD444.asp). If I were to stick with a SATA solution, this would probably be it.

The website really does not provide any technical information about the product you are describing.

[Brian Deviteri]

Again, I’m well aware that DVCPRO HD will work on many (if not all) of the solutions mentioned. Heck, you could probably edit DVCPRO HD off of an expensive Compact Flash card, some of those rates are 20MB/s and higher.

I’m more concerned with a solution that will allow for uncompressed to work flawlessly with the RAID-5 capabilities.

And, as I mentioned in a previous post, the S2VR-HD is 230 MB/s and the S2VR-Duo is 150 MB/s. The HD444 is 450 MB/s, but still unable to do RAID-5.

[John Foley]

SATA RAIDs are almost all set up with the Apple Disk Utility as either RAID 0 or RAID 1.

The product I am describing sets up the RAID on the card, so that the entire RAID volume appears to MacOS as one disk. When ever the next time you update your version of OS X and loose the RAID set, you would understand the difference.

It also is one of possibly two products that allow you to set up a RAID 5 on card and this setup is not available for SATA RAID’s in most instances.

You should purchase whatever solution you feel most comfortable with, so I was just offering one that others are using successfully.