Soft Raid vs Hard raid. CPU utilization.

[Scott Thomas]

There was someone who did CGI (Lightwave I think) work who also wrote for the trades. His solution was to buy equipment for a production and quickly turn around and sell it after completion of the project. That doesn’t really work for post production workflows, but perhaps there’s something to that. Sell the system and upgrade while the old hardware still has value. Easier said than done.

[Russ D’arensbourg]

I tend to beat equipment to death when it comes to computer gear. Sound equipment (I used to run a sound reinforcement company) I’d flip every year.

I am just going to go ahead and get the ThunderBay.
It seems that nowwhere that I have looked on the internet is there anyone evaluating disk systems with an eye towards the specs that I am interested in.
For a lot of the consumer/SOHO NAS systems the reviews focus on VM usage, simultaneous IO ability (which is important in a group use scenario) and gee whiz features like mobile apps.

The reviews of DAS disk systems seem to focus solely on throughput figures. Which of course are important numbers to post-production users.

It still bothers me that nobody really looks at cpu utilization. While this may be an insignificant statistic if you are using a single array. If you end up using solutions from different manufacturers simultaneously, this has the potential to impact performance.

I suppose I’ve developed a bit of anal retentiveness when I was building DAWs in the 90’s and 2000’s. Back then you had to sweat every cpu stealing process and memory hog. Otherwise you might get audio dropouts in the midst of a multitrack session. Even with high performance, professional grade hardware.