HDD Array – What you using now?

[Gary Milligan]

Just a stab in the dark here… is the drive formatted correctly (Mac vs. MS-DOS)?

[Ben Price]

Great question… and yes… the HDD is formatted for Mac – OS Extended (Journaled).

[Ben Price]

I received the OWC Mercury Rack Pro this morning. (16TB, 4-bay enclosure in a RAID5 configuration). It only took around 15 minutes to unpack, install, and have the array mounted to the desktop and ready for use. Unfortunately, transferring the multicam project that necessitated this purchase took a little over 2 hours. That said, I still couldn’t be happier.

The project media files that would not relink when moved to other HDDs was immediately and automatically found upon project launch. The multicam (MulitClip) clips play back without a single hiccup. These clips contain three tracks of 720p60 Apple ProRes 422 (HQ) footage with realtime ColorFX and AudioFX settings applied. I also tested a MultiClip with eight (8) tracks of 720p60 Apple ProRes 422 for playback. In this instance, I did get some performance hiccups after about two minutes of playback. I can’t be sure if it was the array or not as my Activity Monitor app was also indicating that all 8-cores of my CPU were at 100%.

Oh… this thing is quiet, too. My MacPro makes more noise at idle than the array does during playback.

As it stands a few hours in on day #1, I would absolutely recommend this as a possible solution for those of you looking to add an array to your editing set-up.