Mac Pro with 4 SATA RAID 0 for capture uncompress HD.

[Jerry Hofmann]

Test the speed of the array with a drive speed checker…. AJA has a freebee for download in their support site… if it’s fast enough for the data rate you intend to use (8bit or 10 bit uncompressed) then you’re good to go. I’d want plenty of overhead…. needs to be about 200mb/sec…

Jerry

[Kinthy]

thanks jerry, anyone have tested with this 4 x SATA RAID 0 in MacPro for capture or test with the speed test? Please give commend, thanks.

[Jeff Carpenter]

Remember, if you do this you’ll have to get some sort of external drive to be your boot disc or find some way to fit another SATA drive with an internal SATA card inside the computer.

You’ll need a 5th drive to be your OS X disc in this situation.

[David Battistella]

This is like cooking a steak with a candle. It might work, but how good is it going to be.

You want to play in HD land, you need to spend $.

my two cents

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Uli Plank]

Well, we’ve successfully handled uncompressed SD from Digi-Beta in the old days on a mirrored door G4 Mac with an internal RAID 0 of two drives and the system on an external FW drive. It worked without a hiccup until the RAID was about 90% full

[Shane Ross]

I dunno about the MacPro Raid option, but that is one I’d really like to test. But then I’d need to get a Mac Pro, and I cannot afford that now.

But I do have a Raid 0 of 4 drives inside my G5. (4) 500 GB Hitachi drives and I can work with uncompressed 10-bit HD. Not that I have had much opportunity to, but early on I did have to render a 15 min. chunk of my doc to that format and it played back fine.

Here’s what I did:

https://lfhd.blogspot.com/2006/09/popsicle-raid-redeux.html

But I am ready to get an external box to put these in. Or maybe ANOTHER 4 drives so that I can have 8…4TB of drive goodness.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[David Battistella]

Yes,

In SD land we all tried to run sonnet cards and internal rive and such, but the rality with 10 bit hd is that requires drives that will sustain a data rate of about 165MB/sec. That is a full SIX TIMES faster than uncompressed SD at 27MB/sec. Drives are still running at 7200 or 10000 rpms. Even striped across many drives in a raid zero (which is just a stupid way to operate from a business standpoint) and even if you are aprroaching these speeds, you will still need headroom. Yes, serial ATA in the box is cheaper, we all want it to be a solution, but can you bank you busines on that? I won’t risk that anymore. No way!

There is the “well in theory” approach and the “what actually works” approach. If you want things to work and you want security for your data then I can’t say that this is a smart approach. It might “work”, “sort of”, but HD is much more taxing on the whole system.

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Uli Plank]

We did another test today of only three 400 GB Samsung drives (they said it’s a newer, faster model) and we got a speed of over 220 MB/s for both read and write with an internal RAID 0

[David Battistella]

Uli,

To really test this you should capture about a half hour to fourty minutes of uncompressed 10 bit hd clips and then report back the speed and whether you are getting dropped frames.

Many drive tests will report adequate speed, but you are perpetrating a bit of a myth by reporting raid 0 speeds on empty drives on an internal array.

I am not trying to be a hard ass or rain on anyone’s parade, but the only HD that raid is really good for is DVCPRO HD.

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Uli Plank]

Hi David,

of course you are right that the numbers will drop when it’s getting filled. But I’m aware of that and tested this on a RAID about 40% full at the time. Plus I tested with Blackmagic’s speed test, which is abit more realistic for video than the average benchmark. And I’ll defintely do a recording test as well and post that soon.

I’m aware that this is NOT a professional solution: It’s neither safe (I mentioned that several times) and it’s not fast enough for more than one stream. We’ll be using it for recording uncompressed HD from a Canon H1 in the studio.

A serious RAID for regular editing of uncompressed HD would need 6-8 disks and a FibreChannel interface.

Regards,

Uli

Author of “DVDs gestalten und produzieren”, a book on professional DVD-authoring in German.