Help Configuring New System

[David Roth weiss]

[Tony Stampalia] “What type of storage will give me the best performance for uncompressed HD? Should I go with the Apple internal RAID card and 3-1 TB drives in a RAID 5 (2 TB effective), or get an external RAID Array?

I can assure you, a three drive internal solution won’t cut the mustard. For uncompressed you really need a 6 to 8-drive SATA solution (preferably 8-drive) such as CalDigit, Maxx Digital, Sonnet, etc. All of the brands you see advertised on the sides of this forum are in use by pros all around the world. Of course, RAID-5 is preferred because of the safety factor, as it’s protected in case any single drive should fail.

With regard to your 5.1 needs, you would do better to go to another forum for that info.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Tony Stampalia]

Thanks David.

I reposted saying I dug deeper and found some info on drives. The repost wasn’t put up.

What I find quizzical in your response is why an external array needs to be preferably 6-8 drives. In other words, if you have an 8 Bay chassis with 8-500GB drives, how is that different to Mac/FCP than a chassis with 4-1TB drives. Assuming, of course, they’re both RAID 5.

[David Roth weiss]

Ah ha, that’s a very important concept to wrap your brain around Tony. The relative size of the raid in terabytes is not a major factor that determines the throughput of a raid, throughput is primarily determined by the number of drives, the speed of those drives, and the design and speed of the raid controller card. Raids read and write to and from several drives formatted together as one large drive, and the more drives that it has to read and write to simultaneously, the faster it can perform, and thus the greater the throughput the raid can achieve.

BTW, size of the overall raid volume does come into play too as the raid starts to fill up, because throughput does tend to diminish as amount of available space declines. And, raids should typically never be filled beyond 80% capacity for best performance. So, setting up a raid that will always provide you with the added overhead of lots of free space is a very good idea.

BTW, throughput has numerous advantages in your day editing, number one among them being realtime performance. So, lots of drives and lots of free space will make your editing life a lot easier and will make you much more productive.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Tony Stampalia]

David,

I’ve set up many RAIDS on servers connected to clients who were pulling from databases and data from shared directories. Plus, all the server RAID used hardware (like all available for FCP) to manage the array.

And my Avid is not set up with RAID, but it’s not doing HD. So, what I’m seeing is how critical it is for HD throughput to be maximized during reads with FCP.

Therefore, what I think you’re saying is IOs per second for random loads, and MB per second for sequential loads – IOPS and MBPS – are effected by the number of spindles, and secondarily the controller and cache.

It’s a matter of translating a lot of PC knowledge to Macs, and that’s the heart of my concern. RAID is RAID regardless the OS. That’s the bottom line.

Thanks.

[David Roth weiss]

[Tony Stampalia] “ID is RAID regardless the OS. That’s the bottom line.”

Exactly right.

The compressed formats, such as ProRes, DVCPro100, and HDV don’t require nearly the throughput of uncompressed, hence the reason many editors never deal with uncompressed at all, electing to edit in one the compressed formats, then output that to HDCam or HDCamSR for delivery.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.