Promise Pegasus J4 or GRaid Thunderbolt?

[Eric Hansen]

I have a bunch of 6TB and 8TB G-RAID TB drives and they’re great. averaging 300MB/s.

I personally don’t use 2.5″ drives in the field. I’ve heard anecdotally that they’re less resilient to bumps and bruises. It would be great to hear other’s opinions on this. Personally, I would go with the G-RAID because of this.

Also, the more free space you have, speeds stay high. If you fill the J4, it will slow down considerably. You may not need 8TB, but extra space helps because your data stays on the fast part of the platters.

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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Alex Gerulaitis]

No first-hand experience – J4 boxes are fairly new. Yet if it’s performance-to-size ratio you’re looking for, can’t beat J4. 400MB/s with spinning drives, faster with SSDs. (Seen Hitachi 1TB 7.2K SFF drives for under $100 – that would make a really small yet quite fast 4TB box for under $800.)

At the same time, J4 is overpriced – $400 for a 4-bay software RAID is a bit much, no matter the quality.

Unlike Eric, I’ve had good experience with SFF (2.5″) drives both enterprise and desktop, with AFR smaller than with 3.5″ drives.

Personally, I think LFF (3.5″) form factor is going the way of floppies and CRTs – we already see that on servers; hope to see many more SFF-optimized storage boxes in the next year – and hopefully at a much better price point.

Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA

[Rainer Wirth]

I would go for the promise. We’ve made good experiences with 2,5 drives, but we don’t carry them around very often!
Eric has made a point: Array slows down, when it comes to its capacity end. (Last 20%) So more left space on the raid means better performance (30% headroom).

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Kevin Rag]

Cheers Eric. I think I’ll go with the GRaid for now. For more capacity with 3.5″ drives and they’ve been around for a while, so kind of battle tested too:)

Kannan Raghavan
The Big Toad Films Pte. Ltd.

[Kevin Rag]

Cheers Alex. I was a bit skeptical as not many have used the J4 and the fact that they’re expensive. I think I’ll go with the Graid 8TB. Unless I go for SSDs on the J4, which makes it as expensive as the R4 for less than half the capacity:(

Kannan Raghavan
The Big Toad Films Pte. Ltd.

[Kevin Rag]

Cheers Rainer. Leaning towards the Graid atm. Another couple of nights of researching to be done:)

Kannan Raghavan
The Big Toad Films Pte. Ltd.

[Eric Hansen]

Alex, you’ve used 2.5″ drives extensively in the field and experienced a lower failure rate than 3.5″? I’m confused by some of your acronyms.

when i say “in the field”, i mean how Kannan is using them, while traveling, shooting, editing on the road. Not an external drive sitting on a desk or an internal drive in a data center. For that use, i imagine they’re no different than 3.5″

thanks

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Alex Gerulaitis]

Hi Eric,

Tracked about two hundred 2.5″ drives over the past 8 years or so – in laptops for editing in the field. Not one failure but the sample is too small to make any determinations. A number of clients also use 2.5″ drives for editing in external FW and eSATA enclosures, usually with their laptops, i.e. in the field.

All other things being equal, I have more faith in SFF (“Small Form Factor” – usually 2.5″ but can also include 1.8″) than LFF (“Legacy Form Factor” – 3.5″) because:
– smaller drives are less affected by vibration, shock, heat-related tracking issues. This is simply a result of smaller size and slower linear speeds;
– higher density where you can pack 3-4 SFF drives in a place of one LFF means you could make RAID0, 5 or even 6 where it’s impossible with larger drives: more performance and reliability options.

SFF drives are more expensive of course so LFF ones are still the value leaders. A 4TB J4 would cost around $800; G-RAID – less than half that.

[Kevin Rag]

Cheers Alex. I’ve used the Caldigit VR mini for a long time without any problems at all. I was using FW800 and RAID0. I could use only DVC Pro HD. I’m looking for speed now as I ingest and edit at the same time. The R4 is fantastic for this as I get brilliant speed with RAID 5 redundancy. Am willing to forgo the safety of RAID 5 for speed in a small form factor. If only I could get the J4 with SSDs for the price of a Graid:(

Kannan Raghavan
The Big Toad Films Pte. Ltd.

[Rome Will]

Great comments guys!…I have some experience with the J4 I wanted to share…and also maybe get some help with.

Set up my J4 last night with 4x500gb Samsung 840 (regular not the Pro) SSDs…tested it with blackmagic speed test and got around 550 write and 640 read…but the SSD’s were in RAID 0 (all four were stripped to together on the J4)…

My problem is that the device is advertised for speeds of +750 write/read when using SSD in RAID 0 format…so am I doing something wrong?! I’ve heard something about removing the cache, enabling TRIM (etc…) but that wouldn’t cause such a hit to performance would it?

I’m thinking I need the Pro edition for Samsung 840 given the difference in technology (one uses TLC, the regular, while the pro uses MLC…)…

Or am I missing something here? Really need those +750 speeds (want to edit footage and don’t want to use proxies when doing 2.5k- haven’t edited in a while and that workflow is new to me…).

Again, thanks and hopefully this ends up helping somone as this device starts to get around in the mkt.