RAID Recommendations for DaVinci Resolve

[Margus Voll]

You should dig in to Raid forum here on Cows.

There is a lot very specific information lingering around there about that.

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Margus

https://iconstudios.eu
https://vimeo.com/iconstudioseu/videos

DaVinci 9, OSX 10.7.4
MacPro 5.1 2×2,93 24GB
GTX 470 / Quadro 4000
Multibridge 2 Pro

[Tomas Bocking]

Thank Margus, yes I have been reading the forums, looking for information.

Wht I found on review sites is that the performace of ext4 seems better than xfs.

I KNEW that xfs was a must for video editing, has anything changed regarding ext4, is it better than xfs?

Thanks

Thomas

[Margus Voll]

I think you are going into really low level of details here

Mostly people talk about speed and raid level protection.

You should see that your array gives out speed needed for your workflow with some overhead.

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Margus

https://iconstudios.eu
https://vimeo.com/iconstudioseu/videos

DaVinci 9, OSX 10.7.4
MacPro 5.1 2×2,93 24GB
GTX 470 / Quadro 4000
Multibridge 2 Pro

[Paul King]

Hi Tomas

The most recent models of Areca cards are now just LSI cards with Areca’s front end.
Having said that, Areca do have an engineering level in their card BIOS, it’s accessed with a difference password to the default ‘0000’.
In that BIOS there are extra settings relating to video performance. However a lot of these relate to the use of the card in OEM applications for video SANs.

With Davinci, you’re usually only accessing one clip at a time so these extra settings wont really help. They are about stream count and read ahead performance.

With the Areca’s it’s best to just use the default settings and you’ll get the best all round performance for a DAS workstation.
Video applications have a bit of everything in them from a usage perspective, large sequential read, random sequential read, image sequences etc, so no one setting will help.

[Joakim Ziegler]

We run our Linux Resolve system on a 24-disk Areca card, with ext4. You’ll probably want to get newer versions of e2fstools than the ones that are included with the standard Resolve CentOS install, since that will let you format partitions larger than 16TB. Apart from that, you will want to tune your stripe and stride parameters when you create the file system to reflect the layout of your RAID.

Doing this gives us performance in excess of 1GB/sec both read and write on a RAID6 with 24 drives, which should be plenty for most Resolve use.

—
Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor

[Tomas Bocking]

Margus, Joakim and Paul thank you so much for your help, but I keep having performance issues, very inconsistent playback framerates.

Lets see if you could identify anything I might be doing wrong:

Hardware:

Dual Xeon
Display card fx3800
GPU card: fx5800
12gb ram
Areca 1882x
11x 2TB Seagate Barracuda 7200

RAID info:
Raid level 5
Stripe 128k (this is the max it will allow)
Block size 512
Cache attribute = Write-back
Write Protection = Disabled
Tag Queuing= Enable

Steps to create the file system
Parted:
Partition table GPT
mkpart primary 0.0TB 20.0TB
create filesystem: mkfs.xfs -b size=4k -l lazy-count=1 -d su=128k -d sw=10 /dev/sdb1
Mounting: mount -o inode64 /dev/sdb1 /media/LocalMedia/

Is anyone able to identify something that might be giving me such a crappy performance?

Thanks in advance and thanks again for everyone who collaborated in this thread.

Tomas

[Margus Voll]

Your gpu’s are dated both of them.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu
https://vimeo.com/iconstudioseu/videos

DaVinci 9, OSX 10.7.4
MacPro 5.1 2×2,93 24GB
GTX 470 / Quadro 4000
Multibridge 2 Pro

[Tomas Bocking]

Yes but the system was not showing these symtoms when working connected to a san.

I’m having problems now that I have put a raid card in and tryng to make it work locally.

Any insights about the raid creation process?

Thanks a lot

Thomas

[Joakim Ziegler]

I haven’t used XFS in a very long time, so I can’t help you that much there. I see options in your mkfs.xfs line that look like stripe width and stride, though, so you’ve probably got that part right.

What kind of playback performance are you getting? Have you benchmarked with bonnie++ to see what the filesystem is giving you in general?

—
Joakim Ziegler – Postproduction Supervisor

[Tomas Bocking]

I’ve tried both xfs and the last version of ext4 tools that would allow over 16tb volumes with pretty much the same results.

Any ideas?