Raid question (for Bill Buchanan)

[Kushal Shah]

HI Jarromir

adaptec 2410 is not PCI X 100 mhz card so your less throughput is actually card limitation

any of the hardware raid cards are useless as they have hardware over head for processing raid 0
however you can still use cards like broadcom BC4852 but performance wont be as good as software
stripe .for HD video you will surely need to stripe 8 Drives
my suggestion is to use 8 port plain sata controller and stripe the drive in windows
8 x 300 GB maxtor drives on supermicro mv 8 sata controller i am able to get 500 MB burst
in decklink utility. card should coast you around 120 $ and its cheaper then any other hardware raid

[Bob Zelin]

The SATA host controller cards you need are the Sonnet Tempo X eSATA 8 port, or the Highpoint RocketRaid 1820A. You need to use ALL EIGHT DRIVES to be able to get uncompressed HD to work.

Bob Zelin

[Bill Buchanan]

Jaromir:

First, I’m not qualified to correctly answer your questions. So please don’t rely on my responses as the final word. I’m not familiar with the Adaptec 2410. But before I switched to SATA from SCSI, I ran an RAID 0 array controlled by an Adaptec 2010S. That array (14 73gb cheetahs), using BMD’s disk speed utility, it never tested faster than about 100MB/sec Read and Write. Perhaps I never had it setup properly, because the array should have tested much, much faster. Adaptec could never come up with a reason why it was so slow. It was fast enough for my 10-bit uncompressed SD work, but I never tried HD with it. I never tried stripping the drives through Windows, so I have no idea what the speed would have been. With dual xeon 3gb cpus, I don’t believe system overhead whould have been an issue. It hasn’t with the RAIDCore 4852 cards setup as RAID 5. Again, I haven’t done any HD work yet, so I have no idea if my setup would handle it.

As I mentioned before, anyone doing long-form with huge libraries is rolling the dice using stripped sets/RAID 0 configurations. I’d suggest you study RAIDCore’s info carefully. Good luck.

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co.

[Adrian Tecson]

As i mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I got my hands on an HDPro 4:4:4. I have a 5way SATA stripe set to RAID 0 on my adaptec and it wasnt enough to sustain 10bit uncompressed HD. 8bit did fine, but 10bit kept on dropping frames. Question though is has anyone been able to use 10bit HD using a RAID 5? How many drives would I need? Any also, which Raid card has more than 8 SATA nodes? I’d like to take Bill’s advice on running RAID5 on my ucompressed SD, but when I move to HD, i’m not sure how to get HD usable on a RAID5 setup.

[Bob Zelin]

Hi –
there are no SATA cards on the market that have more than 8 ports on them. Becuase current SATA cards do not support “port multiplication” (looping SATA drives off one port) – you can’t have more than 8 SATA drives per card. 8 drives is enough to do uncompressed HD. I am told that the Highpoint RocketRAID 1820A does RAID 5, but I don’t know how it does it. The Sonnet Tempo X eSATA does not do a hardware RAID 5.
Of course, the Apple XServe RAID DOES do RAID 5 (and RAID 50), and DOES uses the same Hitachi SATA drives, but of course, this is a Fibre to SATA product, and costs $13,000.

The DR Group in LA have done a LOT of work with the Highpoint SATA card, so you might want to contact them. They are a good group of people to work with.

Bob Zelin

[Sarcoma]

I think the RocketRaid 2240 takes 16 drives…4×4 “infiniband” ports, raid 5, pci-x.

[Ramona Howard]

There are 12 port cards(haven’t checked out the latest RocketRaid), I’m not sure if all will work with the Mac. The newest 3ware boards are quite impressive. 8 port boards gives us more than double the thruput of what we were getting a short two months ago.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Bob Zelin]

This is going to become another of my smart ass posts – but here it goes. To me, cheap HD (the most popular HD in Florida) is DVCProHD, which you DO NOT need a big drive array to accomplish. Even one Firewire 800, or certainly two SATA drives stripped RAID 0 will give you the ability to do DVCProHD (Panasonic Varicam footage).
When people moan about doing “cheap” uncompressed HD, to me, it usually means that they have footage from a Sony CineAlta, and have access to a Sony HD VTR – which are all EXPENSIVE items – even to rent. So if you are doing “expensive HD” with the “expensive Sony HD VTR’s” which require uncompressed HD – why do you have to cheap out on your drive array? A nice HUGE U320-RX or Apple XServe RAID will work flawlessly for uncompressed HD – and yes, they are both over 10 grand, but a fraction of the price of your Sony HD VTR.

Bob “stuck in Florida with “cheap” HD VTR’s” Zelin

[Kaspar Kallas]

Hi

I use DP 2.0 with sonnet 4+4 and have 5 internal drives (I think seagate 7200.8 300gb) and can do 10bit 4:2:2 through-out the raid (no 4:4:4)

-Kaspar

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Ramona,
Are you talking about new 9550SX line? They are quoting some amazing RAID 5 and RAID 0 speeds. What kind of rates are you guys seeing? Have you tested the 12 and 16 port cards? Thanks for any info you can pass on!

I am totally cross platform and work on Windows, Linux, OSX, and other Unix variants but I wish more of these companies would support OSX. I don’t know if these RAID OEMs realize how much demand there is for a SATA RAID solution from a mature vendor on OSX.
Thanks again,
Gary