MacPro SATA drives

[Jerry Hofmann]

Well, you’ll need one of the 4 drives to serve as a startup disk, so it wouldn’t be used in an array… leaving you only 3 drives. Likely not fast enough for more than a stream of HD uncompressed… would work great though with ProRes instead.

If you really must have uncompressed HD, I’d suggest a CalDigit array instead… would be a lot faster with a 4, 5 or their fab 8 drive array.

Jerry

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[Joe Stiles]

We will be doing the bulk of our our HD work in DVCPro HD, but would like the option to do uncompressed if the need arises…shorter corporate pieces probably, nothing over 30 minutes.

What if I added two more SATA drives in the 2nd optical bay and used 1 for my boot drive and striped the other 5 for editing? I feel confident that would work for DVCPro HD, but what about uncompressed? Are there any cooling issues involved with housing 6 SATA drives inside the MacPro?

Thanks again for sharing your knowledge.

Joe

[Walter Biscardi]

I have never been a fan of internal arrays. Too much heat for my tastes inside a computer, I want that box to be as cool as possible.

We have always used external arrays here and I can’t say enough about the guys at MaxxDigital. Keep in mind they sell pretty much all the major SATA arrays so they can help you choose the right unit for your needs.

Our ProEVO unit tops out at 500MB/s even in RAID 5.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Jerry Hofmann]

I’d not do that… wasn’t intended to house a SATA drive don’t think, and the connections may not be compatible… I actually haven’t looked into this, but still figure since no one’s talking about it, that it’s not a good idea.

I really like the idea of external storage, and you could just start with the internals, then add as needed… DVCPROHD will run all day long on a SINGLE sata so I’d be prone to NOT stripe these drives so that if one fails, you don’t lose all…

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer

Author: “Jerry Hofmann on Final Cut Pro 4” Click here

Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D

[David Roth weiss]

[Joe Stiles] “We will be doing the bulk of our our HD work in DVCPro HD, but would like the option to do uncompressed if the need arises…”

This is precisely why Pro Res 422 exists. It allows you to ingest HDCAM and output to HDCAM and nobody you edited in an intermediate format that didn’t require a expensive raid array.

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

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[Jason Porthouse]

Joe,

I’m running a 3-drive RAID0 stripe internally at the moment. Fine for ProRes HD. Ideally I would have an external array but needs must at the moment. If you go for an internal, don’t pay Apples’ over-inflated price for drives – installing the drives into the caddies is a 10 minute job. The only gotcha is to remember that some SATA drives have jumpers to switch between SATA1 and 2 modes – you need to make sure that 2 is activated in order to get the full 300mb/sec. Get good drives from a reputable online store and you’ll save mucho $$$…

Jason

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[Joe Murray]

The other advantage of external drives is that if you system melts down you can move easily to a new system and keep working – as you will, of course have backed up your project files elsewhere – idisc is good

Dual 1.25 MD, FCP 4.02, CW4, 1.25GB RAM, DUAL ATTO, Medea RT480 QT6.3

[Herb Sevush]

Joe –

I’ve been running a 3 drive, raid 0, striped set with internal drives for over a year now. It can definitely handle DVCPRO HD – it can handle a four camera multi-clip of it in fact, although it drops resolution a little to handle it. Using the Black Magic disk speed utility I get reads of about 125 MB/s in this configuration.

However …

I just purchased an 8 drive MaxxDigital array for the following reasons –

Raid 0 arrays are more prone to crash than individual drives -if you have a 3 drive array you are 3 times more likely to crash, with 5 drives 5 times more likely, etc.

Even though I have all my media on tape, the idea of having to recapture terabytes of material in the middle of a job is not something I want to increase the possibilities of. The external arrays can give you Raid 5 protection, along with much faster reads – my MaxxDigital tests out to 515 MB/s in raid 5. The extra cost of the external box will more than pay for itself if it prevents 1 mid job crash. Plus the additional speed will enable you to work in uncompressed HD if you need to.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions

[Joe Stiles]

Jerry, David, Walter, Jason, Joe and Herb – Thank you all for the thoughtful answers and experience-based knowledge. My thirst for knowledge on the pros and cons of internal SATA drives vs. external has been sated (for now). Good luck to all of you.

Joe

[John Gyldstrand]

Joe give me a call if you have any questions about this I would like to see if we can’t help you out.
all the best John Gyldstrand 714-374-4944