Picking new Raid Drives

Storage & Archiving

Picking new Raid Drives

Posted by Bob Miller on May 6, 2017 at 7:07 pm

Hello,

So, I’m editing off a Macbook Pro 15 inch 2014 maxed out on Premiere Pro (I know, it’s not a beast for editing) and recently got a gig where I was given a regular bus powered drive with 4K compressed footage (from Canon). Anyways, I had problems with it and realized I should have transferred that bus drive footage onto my USB 3.0 Raid from OWC. (The difference being 99 read/write to 206 read/write)

This of course sent me down a rabbit hole that maybe I need a bigger faster drive in general. So, I started looking at some numbers.

My SSD drive on my computer has these numbers:

I was curious what speed was fast enough for a 2160p25/30 timeline across the board (see circled section).
In other words, if 900 write/read is getting me to knock out some of the 2160p50/60 numbers, what’s the minimum I need to just get where I circled.

Was looking at these options. All of which unfortunately posted their disk speed in a different format and don’t list 2160p25/30:

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB2IVT08.0S/
677.5 write / 703.7 read

https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB2IVT12.0S/
736.1 write / 743.8 read

This is obviously not fast enough, but put here for the heck of it because it’s cheaper:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/TB2U3MED04TH/
which is around 380 write /read

I also understand in my current setup that at a certain point the bottle neck becomes not the disk speed but the actual power/graphics card of the system. And perhaps I’m better served just getting the cheapest/slowest option I posted below and working with proxies. I suppose I was thinking I’d get a disk drive system that could be upgraded when I upgrade to a PC tower of if Apple ever releases something!

Thanks in advance,

Greg Janza replied 9 years ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
2 Replies

Bob Zelin
May 7, 2017 at 5:04 pm

the more drives you have spinning (either SSD or SATA) the faster the array will run. 4 drives run faster than 2, 6 drives faster than 4, 8 drives faster than 6. Buy a RAID – end of story. These products are not expensive. Don’t think about “what happens when I get a new PC or Mac Pro in 2019” – your gear will be obsolete by then – your 2014 MacBook Pro will seem silly in 2019. Everything becomes obsolete quickly these days. Buy what you need to make a living, and bill your clients. Don’t worry about your long term investment (one exception – buy a comfortable chair for yourself – that will still be good in 2019).

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com
Greg Janza
May 9, 2017 at 7:19 pm

[Bob Miller] “This is obviously not fast enough, but put here for the heck of it because it’s cheaper:”

For 4k editing with compressed files, that speed is more than enough. If you plan on editing uncompressed 4k you’re going to need a beefy raid at max speed but for compressed 4k, a raid that tests around 400/MB/s read/write will be quite sufficient.

Adobe Premiere 2017.1
Windows 10 Pro
Samsung SSD 850 EVO system
Samsung SSD 850 EVO Adobe cache
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970
OWC Thunderbay 12t x 2 in Raid10 configuration (thru Storage Spaces and Disk Management)

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