How many HD streams on FCP 5?

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Gary,
I don’t know if you have more than one S2S but can you think of anything that would prevent you from software striping two units together? Have you tried this? I have a crazy idea of maybe setting up a RAID5 between 3 or 4 units.
Gary

[Francois Xavier]

[Fred Connors Jr] “you will also need a PCIe HBA, Host Bus Adapter”

Fred, what is that ? the sata array adapter ?

Documentary Director & Editor
Paris /France

[Gary Adcock]

[Gary Taylor] “I don’t know if you have more than one S2S but can you think of anything that would prevent you from software striping two units together?”

I have not tried this yet, but the 3 things that I think of that may be problematic would be
1) there is only one SATA connection on the S2S – and that goes to the HBA
2) multiple S2S;s on one HBA may actually decrease the bandwidth.
3) adding extra HBA’s to one machine could possibly not allow the use of your capture card.

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA

[Fred Connors jr.]

Yes Francois X

It is the card(s) you install into you computer (host) the connect to external or additional Serial ATA disk drives.

Fred

[Jordan Woods]

I am still hacking away at that experimental raiding— was able to software raid multiple 8bay sata configurations, but the raid5 has not stood up to the test, it fails on writing— only prebuilt drive systems like xserve raid has been capable(hardware raided though)

and yes, the HBA thingy is a major pain… how many cables do you like streaming out of the back of the computer?

-but our custom 8bay raid(0) systems rock out on uncompressed HD without problems, clocking 340mb/s sustained speeds

i’d love to know if Highpoint gets it together and their raid5 actually works with this new pciE deal…

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Gary,
Have you been about to capture uncompressed 8 or 10 bit HD with the S2S? I know that Lacie implies that it could be used for HD capture? Thanks for the other warnings.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Jordan,
Thanks for your input. Yours appears to be the sort of the cautionary tale that I was looking for.

Are your external RAID 0 being done in software or hardware. I am just wondering if you are doing RAID 0 in software and then doing the RAID 5 in software as well? One of the interesting things for me about the S2S is its ability to do RAID 0 in hardware, albeit with the loss of a drive’s capacity.

I am in full agreement about excessive numbers of cables. Moving forward I like the use of infiniband like that used in HighPoint 2240. I just need to them to release it in PCIe version.

On the issue of software RAID I am not suprised there Mac users are finding the problems with RAID that they are. I think most of our options would be considered mid-level at best on the PC. I would be interested in knowing what your CPU utilization is on your system with that monster RAID you have there.

I really wish someone would come out with a SATA RAID card with a dedicated XOR processor like the ARECA, or 3Ware units available on the PC. For video applications where real time is based on CPU doing all those caculation in software has to cost you something.
Gary

[Gary Adcock]

[Gary Taylor] “Have you been about to capture uncompressed 8 or 10 bit HD with the S2S? I know that Lacie implies that it could be used for HD capture? “

Easily,
1080p24 10bit captures were kept short just in case (less than 5 minutes each) and 720p24 10bit was a breeze, I was able to capture 30 minutes without a single blip in my testing to date.

Secondly the only issue I had on then install was the fact I had the machine set up for SCSI capture, and it took more than a couple
of try’s to get it working do to the incompatibility of the existing Atto Drivers conflicting with the SATA drivers needed for the S2S.

Gary Adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation
Chicago, IL USA

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Gary,
Thanks again for your response. I just had a very frustrating couple of hours on the phone with Lacie tech support with no luck so I was hoping you could help me out. Is there a chance you might be able to do a longer test of 1080p or 1080i? Have you limited your captures to 5 minutes because of some earlier problem?

Have you been able to test the S2S’s Safe mode for speed using the Kona test suite? In particular I am trying to find out what its write speed is?
Thanks again,
Gary