HD speed test

[Bob Zelin]

if you have 2 or 3 SATA drives all stripped together RAID 0, then you can do 8 and 10 bit uncompressed, and DVCProHD. You will NOT be able to do uncompressed 8 or 10 bit HD, with only 2 or 3 SATA drives at RAID 0. You will need a minimum of EIGHT SATA drives, unless you have the amazing Cal-Digit S2VR, which can do uncompressed HD with only 5 SATA drives (and no, you can’t use your existing SATA drives – they won’t sell you an empty chassis).

Bob Zelin

[Dean Decarlo]

The Cal-Digit site reports that the S2VR HD gets 226 read MB/sec and 216 write MB/sec on th Blackmagic disk speed test. I have 4 Seagate 320gb 16mb cache drives Raid 0 on a P965 motherboard and get 291 MB/sec on the Blackmagic Disk speed test. I haven’t done any HD yet but should I not believe that my system could do it? It’s working great for SD.

[Bob Zelin]

you will find that learing how to do these speed tests are very important – especially in the future when you start to get dropped frames. You need about 220mb/sec to do uncompressed HD, no matter what drives you use.

And no matter how many times we write about this, there will always be someone who writes in “how come I can’t do uncompressed HD on my firewire 400 drive”.

Bob Zelin

[Pentti Kakkori]

Those Seagate 320/16 disks look very promising. I tested with Blackmagic speed test every single disk before I built RAID5. Results from 72.9 to 78.6 MB/s! Read and write speeds were almost identical. Now in 8 disk RAID5 read 440 MB/s and write 430 MB/s. Controller is Raidcore BC4852 (Ciprico) in 133 MHz PCI-X slot.

[Scott Jensen]

Thats interesting. The P965 motherboard does not appear on the BM site as an approved motherboard, I wonder why? Are you using a raid controller card or the on board raid? Exactly which motherboard are you using (manufacturer, model number etc.)? Thanks

[Dean Decarlo]

Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 using the built in SATA controllers and Intel Raid manager. I tried a 4 disk Raid 5 and read was over 200 MB /sec. but write was like 20 since it was software Raid. I’m using an extra drive to throw stuff on to for short term backup since I’ve had a bunch of Raid 0s fail on me in the past. This setup seems good for SD and I guess I’ll have to see how it handles HD when the time comes. I doubt storage is going to go up in price. I know Sata drives get slower vs. scsi as they fill up. How accurate is that disk speed test? I’m interested in that Raid 5 setup that was mentioned. I’d love to have a fail safe set up.

[Nikolas T]

From my experience, numbers you get from benchmark test never guarantee what you can do with the storage.

Actually, I was able to get very good data rate with a pair of CalDigit S2VR Duo connected to an eSATA PCIe HBA. Write and read reach almost close to 300MB/s by striping 4 hard drives together, or striping across two enclosures set to hardware RAID-0.

First time when I saw these numbers, I thought I could save a lot of money by purchasing two 2 bay enclosure instead of 5 bay solution I had installed for my HD editing system. But in spite of it’s 300MB/s read and write performance, It never allow me to run any 10 bit uncompressed footage in FCP timeline.

[Nikolas T]

Forgot to mention that I have Caldigit HD, 5 bay, and it DOES allow me to capture and edit 10 bit uncompressed 1080i in FCP without any problem.
The datarate I get from this 5 bay enclosure is about 220MB/s, while a pair of their 2 bay is around 290MB/s.

[Bob Zelin]

I am confused by your posts. In your first post, you said that you CANNOT do 10 bit uncompressed HD, and in your second post, you said that you CAN do 10 bit uncompressed HD.

I can assure you that Cal Digit SATA arrays can do uncompressed 10 bit 1080i
HD-SDI. If you use TWO of these chassis, with the FASTA-4x or FASTA4e SATA host card, and stripe all TEN drives together RAID 0, you will get about 450mb/sec, which far exceeds the requirement for uncompressed HD.

If you are having problems doing uncompressed HD with this solution, please post EXACTLY what MAC you have, what operating system, what slots your Blackmagic and Cal Digit host card are in, and what other cards (if any) are in your MAC (like do you have a ADS or SIIG Firewire card in one of the slots, that may be slowing down your system? ).

Bob Zelin

[Nikolas T]

Bob,

You’re right. I know two Caldigit 5 bay can reach 450MB/s. I own both S2VR HD 2.5TB with PCIe host card and two S2VR DUO 1.0TB. And I use the 5 bay for 10 bit uncompressed HD editing without any problem so far. But I was just curious about if I could do the same thing with two DUO (4 hdd total) striped across together.