huge 4105 or medea FCR2…

[Chris Borjis]

I’ve got the HUGE 1.2TB array and love it.
It utilizes 4gb fibre-channel. It’s been rock solid reliable since day one.

but the 4105 might be overkill for your purposes.

[Walter Biscardi]

Both are outstanding companies and you can’t go wrong with either.

When you say HD, do you mean uncompressed HD? That will be iffy with a five drive array. DVCPro HD or HDV sure, but I wouldn’t try uncompressed HD on it.

We run HD on a 10 drive Med

[Jeremy Garchow]

I’d stick with the Huge 4105. I have and love it. It can handle 1080i, but not across the whole stripe in RAID-3. For compositing purposes you could fill it up and composite all day. You cannot beat the speed and reliability for a single channel RAID. Also, if your business expands, you could always get another one and stripe them together. You will then essentially have a 4210.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

I would like to add that if you are doing uncompressed 720p24, it will handle that no problem across the whole array. What format of HD are you working in?

Jeremy

[Danny Princz]

working in AE at 1080i and final delivery will be AVID qts.

I just need to make sure that the data rate is high enough that i can render out blackmagic 8bit HD (10bit would be nice) and be able to view the files in FCP

FCP would then be used if i have to rerender any smaller pieces and cut them in to the timeline

Then export the sequences to DNxHD for the symphony (not my choice)

[Danny Princz]

uncompressed 1080i

[Danny Princz]

so as long as the drive is less than what % full can it handle 1080i playback?

would you stripe a 2nd drive in raid 0 then? and it would be just as failsafe as a 10 drive unit?

[Jeremy Garchow]

It can be around 60% full in RAID3. If you are running raid0 it can handle 1080i across the whole stripe, but then you are running with no redundancy. With two 4105s, you would set up each in RAID3 and then stripe them together RAID0, that way you can afford to lose one drive on each side of the array and have plenty of bandwidth for 1080i. If you are in a budget crunch, I’d start with one unit, see if it’ll work for you and then add a second if it’s not quite fast enough. If you are doing a composting and cuts only system, I’d bet the one unit will suit you. Huge products will also rebuild themselves in the background if you do lose a drive and all the while you can still keep on editing, rendering, whatever. There might be a dip in performance while this is happening, but you can still work. I can’t recommend these enough.

Jeremy

[Mike Schuyler]

Hi,

I saw this thread on the cow and thought I would chime in. The Medea FCR2 is capable of doing 10 bit HD on a single 5 drive to about 60-70% of the array. This is why we recommend a 10 drive FCR2X so you don’t have to worry at what percent of storage you’re at. Secondly our storage will handle fragmented data better than the Huge array will because of our MST (Multi Stream Technology) Cache system that is built into our controller. The is 64MB of RAM that is built on our controller that we do read data into allowing the drive to make bigger seeks with less chance of a dropped frame.

If you would like to get more info on this please feel free to contact me directly at 888-296-3332 x109 or michael_schuyler@avid.com

Mike Schuyler
Medea Corp.

[Walter Biscardi]

Thanks for chiming in Mike. Always great to get input directly from the manufacturer in these threads.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
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