Softraid and benchmark

[Darin Wooldridge]

Nice.. What kind of speeds are you getting during playback?
Looks like I need to do some reading about these drives.
I’m guessing they are loaded with a cache to achieve that kind of number.
When trying to playback I’m curious if the loose performance when it caches. (fast, slow, fast, slow)
Curios about the true sustained speed of the raid. I have found huge peaks and valleys using sata. Thats what pushed me to upgrade to the 32 fibre drives I am currently using for my heavy work. They don’t relay on the cache to give me the high read right numbers.

Sascha when are you going to hook up a video card so we can see what it can really do??

Darin Wooldridge
Colorist / Technical Strategist
818-653-3918-cell
dwooldridge@mac.com
check me out at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Davinci-Resolve-Colorist/117363011609028?ref=….

[Sascha Haber]

Haha…lets see what Santa has in his big red sack for me 🙂
I am just grooving in with what i have now.
Sure the Decklink is next…then the Quadro 4000

But speaking of benchmarks…
Has anyone a project loaded with nodes everyone can playback ?
I would like to toast those 32 Cuda cores in the GT120 for starters.

[Guilherme Ramalho]

Hi guys,

My setup:

Mac Pro 12 core 2,66
24 Ram
4 Black-Caviar 2 TB Raid Soft 0
GT120
FX4800
Wave

The drives rate 539 MB/s !

I can play 2k dpx with scopes on ! and 5 or even 6 nodes, it starts to get jumpy only with blurs.

I’m very happy with this performance.

Gui Ramalho

[Ron Smith]

My Numbers are similiar in software raid0(striped).
Does anyone have results in Software raid1(mirrored)??
Is it the same or less,thinking of going to raid1(mirrored) for backup protection, but curious if I will lose performance .
Any results would be appreciated.
thanks

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sascha,

It sounds as though you have a great setup which will make Resolve run beautifully.

It is quite normal to see outstanding disk performance figures when a disk array is relatively empty. However the real test comes when the disk array is filled to about 80% capacity. You can certainly expect it to slow down significantly by then but, given how fast it is currently running, you’ve clearly got plenty of safety margin and it will continue to run fast even when your disk array is nearly full.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Darin Wooldridge]

Great news!! Are you running in ofp proxy mode or 8 bit mode on your video monitoring to achieve consistent real time 2k with several nodes open.. I just ordered some Black-Caviar to give them as shot.. 🙂

I to was getting well over 800 MB/s on my home built sata to infiniband raid. I found very inconsitant throughput with high peaks and valleys. It seems I would loose real time playback when the drives cached.. I jumped to fibre and I got the real numbers 400+ mb/s same playback speeds without the slow down every time the drives cached. Another big concern. i have lost several sata drive due to drive failure.. Not a fun situation in raid 0 with clients in the bay.. .

In short the speed of your raid will go well beyond the speed of the mac resolve.

One interesting find.. I hit the same exact 2k dpx frames, set the project to sd and i can play at well over 30fps, locked green gpu all day long. Change the setting to 2k or hd and the gpu seems to run out of steam. Green to red on the gpu status bar.. 800+ mb or 400 mb and it runs the same.. No increased performance doubling the speed of the raid.. It did however run much better when I jumped to fibre and got away from the sata drives that rely heavily on the cache to get the high numbers.

As I see it no matter how fast your raid or drives you will never get the speed to do stereo 2k or even hd with the mac resolve. Linux is still the king using older and slower technology.

Darin Wooldridge
Colorist / Technical Strategist
818-653-3918-cell
dwooldridge@mac.com
check me out at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Davinci-Resolve-Colorist/117363011609028?ref=….

[Darin Wooldridge]

Another interesting find. If I minimize the application and hit play via the wave. I get much better real time performance. No broken audio playback when reviewing 2k dpx frames with audio in full quality 10 bit.. With the client in the room I minimize the application to help the system run better.

Maximize the application and it drops down and now audio is popping with inconsistent playback.

Darin Wooldridge
Colorist / Technical Strategist
818-653-3918-cell
dwooldridge@mac.com
check me out at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Davinci-Resolve-Colorist/117363011609028?ref=….

[Guilherme Ramalho]

Hi Darin,

My monitor is set to:
422 YUV, 10 bit

But I agree with you, I don’t feel safe with may internal Raid 0… Saving for an external Raid 5.
Do you have any experience with the Caldigt’s HDPro2 ?

Gui R.

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Sasha,

Are you using a card for your external RAID or one of the internal ports looped through the case? This is pretty impressive for sure.

Thanks in advance,
Gary

[Sascha Haber]

I am using 4 Western Digital Caviar Black WD2001FASS 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″disks internally connected to the 4 ports in the case.
The system disk resides below the optical drive now.
I also got me a NewerTech MAXPower eSATA 6G PCIe 2.0 RAID Capable Controller Card sitting in port 3 and I have a Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 #OWCMEQX2T8.0S (4 times WD Caviar green 2 TB ) external case connected to it for backup.
I use the internal Raid for playback and grading and run Timemachine over night for safety.

A slice of color…

DaVinci 7.0.3
Dual Xeon 2,4
OSX 10.6.5RAM 6 GB
RAID 8TB intern
Extern 6TB
GTX 285 / GT 120
WAVE