Kona2 and ability to do Uncompressed HD

[Bob Zelin]

Tim –
you are in Fort Myers – right ? This is what everyone in Florida is doing now – you get a Sonnet X4P (for older G5’s) or Sonnet E4P (for MAC Quads), and get 2 loaded Sonnet Fusion 500P chassis – stripe all 10 SATA drives together, and you can do uncompressed HD all day long. A single chassis with 5 drives will not be reliable enough to do uncompressed HD. If you are working with Varicam stuff, that is all DVCProHD native, and you can easily use just 2 SATA drives stripped RAID 0, and it will work flawlessly.
If you are working with Sony HD Cam, and have a Sony HD VTR, like the HDW-M2000, they you have lots of money, which means that you can afford to buy the drives you need (which will be around 5 grand). If you only need DVCProHD, you can get a Terabyte of storage for around $1000 – cheap enough (don’t you have this right now ??). You can get all this crap from Ron Amborn 714 374 4944.

If you want to spend more money, the HUGE arrays are incredible, and will give you amazing performance, but they do cost more than SATA.

bob Zelin

[Walter Biscardi]

Bob, interesting thought for Uncompressed HD storage. Would you recommend this for any mission critical type of HD set-up as in 10 hours a day, everyday for network broadcast production? I’m looking at options right now to either add on to my Med

[Bob Zelin]

Walter – all I can say is TRY IT. SATA works. It ain’t shared storage, and there is no raid protection – but SO FAR it has been unbelieveably reliable (I have NEVER seen a SATA drive fail – but it might happen tomorrow !) – and it’s CHEAP !!!!! The Sonnet X4P will work in your 2 Gig G5’s (no drivers required), and the Sonnet E4P will work in the new PCI-Express Quad machines. You get about 170mb/sec write and 220mb/sec read with AJA Kona System Test with a SINGLE 5 drive chassis. Remember – this ain’t no hardware RAID – it’s just a box with a port multiplier in it – you use Apple Disk Utility to stripe all the drives together. You can put 4 boxes (with 5 drives each) on one Sonnet card – that’s 10 Terabytes with 4 chassis. You need faster than 170mb/sec write speed for uncompressed HD, so you will need more than 5 drives – which means TWO BOXES – all striped RAID 0. This technology only got released in early May 2006, so it’s new to me as well, but so far – IT WORKS.

It is popular because it is CHEAP !!! Will it last as long as a Medea or HUGE array – I have no idea – but so far, I have not seen one fail.

The insane popularity of SATA has occured only because of it’s price point – which is very important to most users.

Bob Zelin

[Ramona Howard]

Walter,

SATA is more than stable for doing HD uncompressed. We have been offering this for the past couple of years in our products and many post-houses are running 24/7 on it 🙂

If you are in the need for lots of storage, SATA is great for both cost and stability and I’m sure Bob will point you in the right direction for the MAC side. I do recommend that you do look at higher-end drives, don’t cheap out just because SATA is less expensive. Pay attention to spindle speeds as this will help as drives fill up and fragmentation sets in…

Best of luck in your quest.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Walter Biscardi]

[Ramona Howard] “I do recommend that you do look at higher-end drives, don’t cheap out just because SATA is less expensive. Pay attention to spindle speeds as this will help as drives fill up and fragmentation sets in…”

Thanks for the input Ramona. What drives do you recommend? I just went and looked at the Sonnet Fusion 500P chassis Bob is talking about and it looks pretty straightforward. But of course it’s just a chassis and I’m really spoiled by Med

[Walter Biscardi]

Thanks for all the advice Bob. Now I’m new to SATA, we’re just testing a few LaCie SATA arrays in one of our suites and they’ve performed flawlessly to date.

So I can stripe up to four chassis together on a single Sonnet SATA card to get the maximum data throughput?

Is it possible to stripe two sets of units on a single SATA card or does that require two cards? That is two drives as one set and two drives as another set and still maintain enough throughput on each pair for uncompressed HD?

Thanks again for the information Bob!

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

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Tim Baker]

You guys rock…I knew I could depend on the Cow.

Price is definitely the concern for me.

Just some info…after I posted I gave the guys at ProMax a call where I bought the two edit systems that I have and they are offering I think what might be a similar box…two towers=10 SATA drives and I got a quote in hand for $2999.00 for 2.5TB…does that sound like a good price?

They said the price includes the card(s), as well…and they are stiped 0 so there is no drive protection, but I think I may be willing to take the chance with regular backups to firewire maybe.

Tim Baker
Chameleon Mobile Video Productions
(239)849-3295
“It is not the light at the end of the tunnel that we should seek…it is the courage to take the next step in the dark that we must find.”

[Walter Biscardi]

[Tim] “Just some info…after I posted I gave the guys at ProMax a call where I bought the two edit systems that I have and they are offering I think what might be a similar box…two towers=10 SATA drives and I got a quote in hand for $2999.00 for 2.5TB…does that sound like a good price?”

Well, I just went and looked at it and the very first specification is a large red flag to me.

– Supports multiple streams of DV, SD, HDV, and most compressed and uncompressed HD formats**

Supports “most” compressed and uncompressed HD formats? Doesn’t sound all that promising.

And you say two towers = 10 SATA drives, but the literature clearly states it’s a 4 bay enclosure and they show 8 drives in their test material.

Our 4 bay solutions incorporate removable drives that can be striped as RAID 0 to serve DV, DVCAM, HDV, SD, and some compressed HD formats such as DVCPro HD.

So I would ensure it’s really 10 drives and not 8. I love ProMax and purchase a lot of stuff from them so I’m sure they’ll get you the right information.

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

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Tim Baker]

You know I caught that to about the “Most”…and I asked about that and he gave me an item # to search for and it came up with a 5 drive chasis X 2 that the online literature says Uncompressed HD…unfortunately I can’t remember what it was and the quote does not have the item # on it.

If…in a perfect world…this was going to work…what do you think about the price point? And what would a similar system cost me from Bob’s suggestion above?

Oh…by the way Bob…I am now in Orlando…been up here about a year and half.

Thanks all.

Tim Baker
Chameleon Mobile Video Productions
(239)849-3295
“It is not the light at the end of the tunnel that we should seek…it is the courage to take the next step in the dark that we must find.”

[Ramona Howard]

Walter,

We have used both Hitachi and WD and both are great. We are shipping with WD RAID Edition at the moment but are not tied to drives with what we do. Abuse is a daily thing around here…..our customers are hitting drives very hard, in fact one studio is throwing an entire render farm at the box and getting sustained thruput (this is in 4:4:4 RGB) and SATA has held up as expected (and it keeps getting better).

SATA may give the illusion of “hey I can do this myself”, and if you consider yourself a systems expert you possibly can but if your looking for reliable thruput 24/7 follow Bobs lead on the MAC side. As with anything in these workflows what works for one thing may not work for another so it’s important to find someone you can trust that can look at your overall workflow not just that you need a particular thruput.

Medea products have always held up well for us and the new Ciprico stuff rocks (we are announcing support shortly for their products).

Walter, feel free to email me off the forum if you need any further details as I’m always happy to share with a friend.

Cheers,
Ramona