RAID: SATA vs Fiberchannel

[Shane Ross]

What flavor of HD? It’s like Baskin Robbins out there with HD…31 flavors. HDV, DVCPRO HD, XDCAM, D5, HDCAM…will you be working with uncompressed HD? ProRes?

Both are viable options…I use both. But there is also direct PCIe connection boxes. eSATA and PCIe are less expensive, but Fibre is also solid and has been around longer.

I don’t think you will go wrong with whatver you go with.

Shane

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[Steven Nichols]

I shoot XDCAM EX and edit in ProRes.

[Bob Zelin]

you can use anything you like, except Firewire 400. ProRes will even work well on a FW800 drive. Fibre Channel is great, but dramatically more expensive than any SAS/SATA solution. All you have to do is look to the left, and to the right on this very forum, right now. You will see banner ads from Dulce Systems, Maxx Digital, Cal Digit, Sonnet Technologies, G-Tech, Fibrenetix, G-Max, and others, ALL whose products work wonderfully with ProRes. You can even stick some additional raw SATA drives into your MAC Pro, and edit away with ProRes. The only product that I would NOT recommend to you are Apple Fibre Channel arrays.

Bob Zelin

[Steven Nichols]

I already stripped 2 drives (RAID 0) in my Mac Pro, but the datarate I get is around 110 MB/s. I heard good things about Dulce’s Pro DQ since it can reach 500-600 MB/s and I was wondering how well it worked with FCP/AJA.

[Bob Zelin]

the Dulce is one of the best products on the market today. It works great with FCP/AJA. But so do all the others that I mentioned. As a matter of fact, the 2 drives that you stripped together in your MAC, to get 110mb/sec will work great for ProRes as well (with AJA). You need to buy nothing. The Dulce is a great product, a great investment, but remember, you don’t need 600mb/sec to work at ProRes (you don’t need this data rate to work at uncompressed HD either).

We are all very fortunate that the technology today outperforms our needs – all at reasonable prices (except for Sony VTRs !).

Bob Zelin

[Steven Nichols]

Sure I don’t need 600 MB/s but I think RAID 5 protection is better than RAID 0-which is none ! I switched to XDCAM EX last year so even though the workflow is great, I bear in mind that one day some drive will fail me, and that I’ll have to explain that to a client.
Besides, when I scrub in the timeline it’s not as reactive as I would like. And last but not least, my internal RAID 0 has “only” 1 TB capacity, and the more you have the more you need 🙂

[Walter Biscardi]

FibreChannel is much more expensive than SATA and really only needed if you’re going to connect multiple workstations.

We run the MaxxDigital SAS/SATA EVO HD and we get about 500MB/s in RAID 5. We have the 8TB model, but they come smaller. There are also a lot of other great SATA models out there like Dulce and Sonnet.

I went with SATA because even though we have three edit suites, we really don’t share projects between rooms enough to warrant the extra expense of FibreChannel and shared storage.

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

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