Storage for LHe and G5 quad

[David Battistella]

Many people are going to SATA raid solutions. I think this is the way to go as it is much faster and can be configured in protected raid storage solutions.

Firewire is capping out so SATA might be a better investment. The question now is whether there is a PCIe sata card available and how that product is working in the new G5’s.

The other issue is that app like FCP do not run faster on the new quads (YET) because they have not been 4 processor enabled.

Think Sata.

David

[Walter Biscardi]

[kev Vardon] “Thus dont think I would like to go for SCSI or Fibre storage this moment.”

For me Fibre is the only way to go now with uncompressed work. FW800 RAIDs like the G-RAID and Big Disk Extreme work great with uncompressed but I get so much realtime with the Fibre’s that it’s hard to work with anything else.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

“The Rough Cut,” an original short film premiering December 7th in full High Definition in Atlanta.
rsvp@biscardicreative.com to reserve seats.
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[David Battistella]

I am with you walt. SInce going Fiber and having everything in the other room (heck I could have it in the next county) is fantastic, but if I was only going to do HDV and SD, it would be hard to justify a fiber solution, this is why SATA might be the best, intermediate step before moving on to larger (expensive) fiber solutions.

David

[Jeremy Garchow]

It seems as if ATTO has released v2.30 of their drivers which in theory, supports the PCIe architecture of the new G5s and the PCIe cards (42es and 44es). They do say in the release notes, however, that power management is not supported on OSX for the 42&44es. i don’t know what that does or does not mean.

Kev, I am with Walter in that Fibre is the way to go. You get what you pay for when it comes to storage. I have had bad experience with SATA and I just could not risk betting my business around it. Ever since I switched to fibre, I have had much less issues. SATA offers little or no protection while fibre arrays do. I had a drive fail in my fibre array and I kept working while a new drive was shipped from the manufacturer overnight. I installed the new drive the next day and the array rebuilt itself in the background while I continued editing. All of this happened with no loss of data, and no down time, except the five minutes it took to install the new drive. Although SATA is getting there, there’s not a ‘homebuilt’ SATA solution that I know of that can handle this type of situation. It might save some money up front, but be prepared to lose some in down time and perhaps lost clients down the line. Sorry to sound so grim, but I just want others to learn from my unfortunate experiences. There are many people on this and other forums that have had nothing but good luck with their SATA arrays. I wish you nothing but good luck as well.

Jeremy

———–
G5 Dual 2Ghz <> 4GB RAM <> FCP 5.02 <> Kona 2
ATTO 42XS <> Huge Systems 4105 Fibre

[Jeremy Garchow]

It seems as if ATTO has released v2.30 of their drivers which in theory, supports the PCIe architecture of the new G5s and the PCIe cards (42es and 44es). They do say in the release notes, however, that power management is not supported on OSX for the 42&44es. i don’t know what that does or does not mean.

Kev, I am with Walter in that Fibre is the way to go. You get what you pay for when it comes to storage. I have had bad experience with SATA and I just could not risk betting my business around it. Ever since I switched to fibre, I have had much less issues. SATA offers little or no protection while fibre arrays do. I had a drive fail in my fibre array and I kept working while a new drive was shipped from the manufacturer overnight. I installed the new drive the next day and the array rebuilt itself in the background while I continued editing. All of this happened with no loss of data, and no down time, except the five minutes it took to install the new drive. Although SATA is getting there, there’s not a ‘homebuilt’ SATA solution that I know of that can handle this type of situation. It might save some money up front, but be prepared to lose some in down time and perhaps lost clients down the line. Sorry to sound so grim, but I just want others to learn from my unfortunate experiences. There are many people on this and other forums that have had nothing but good luck with their SATA arrays. I wish you nothing but good luck as well.

Jeremy

———–
G5 Dual 2Ghz <> 4GB RAM <> FCP 5.02 <> Kona 2
ATTO 42XS <> Huge Systems 4105 Fibre

[Ramona Howard]

Fiber is awesome but does have limitations in itself. HD and even 2K for that matter can be done on SATA just as easily as Fiber. It really boils down to what makes sense for the studios workflow.

Fiber has more than proved itself and in fact it was what we(the studio) used for the Sin City project BUT we are getting better performance on the 24 drive SATA solution than the 16 drive Fiber array that was used and many of our customers are using a SATA solution today vs the fiber because of cost, storage space and the flexability that can be done with SATA vs Fiber.

Within our app, we have a job system that throttles the network, we can’t throttle fiber, or at least not yet. This is a huge seller because items can run in the background and watch the buffer to throttle the network when needed. This allows you to get I/O and jobs running at the same time when the system allows.

This is not to advocate Fiber vs SATA and only to show that many considerations should be looked at when making a choice. Not an easy process by any means.

Good luck to all.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Jeremy,

You comment:
SATA offers little or no protection while Fibre arrays do. I had a drive fail in my Fibre array and I kept working while a new drive was shipped from the manufacturer overnight. I installed the new drive the next day and the array rebuilt itself in the background while I continued editing.

SATA does offer this same solution, not sure where you are getting this from. If you run in RAID protection modes you can continue to work, replace the drive and rebuild without loosing any data.

You comment:
Although SATA is getting there, there’s not a ‘homebuilt’ SATA solution that I know of that can handle this type of situation.

Agreed, SATA should be built and configured by companies that know what they are doing. But honestly you don’t need to be a brain surgeon here. Our systems are built be a company in Fremont that is huge, they are, or have been #1 sellers for both Intel and AMD and have been doing this for awhile. Working side by side to build and configure our systems I can say there is allot to it but once you understand the do’s and don’ts it’s rather easy.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Jeremy Garchow]

Thanks for the clarification, Ramona. I guess I should have been more clear. I assume (and maybe that’s my mistake) that most people on this forum are talking about getting a couple of burly boxes with a cheap 8 port SATA controller and 8 drives and building their own SATA arrays. I am not talking about prebuilt and configured SATA arrays with dedicated hardware controllers and interface of choice. Also, I have not seen a ‘cheap’ SATA solution that offers RAID3 the way most pre built fibre solutions have on board. If you find one, let me know. The controllers I had experience with used RAID5 and the performance was not so great.

You say: ” BUT we are getting better performance on the 24 drive SATA solution than the 16 drive Fiber array”

I think you are in a different league than some or most of us here. 24 drive SATA? How do you interface to that? What box holds 24 drives and what controls them?

———–
G5 Dual 2Ghz <> 4GB RAM <> FCP 5.02 <> Kona 2
ATTO 42XS <> Huge Systems 4105 Fibre

[Ramona Howard]

Jeremy,

If my movie or commercial were at stake I would not build it myself. Simple storage that doesn’t need the transfer rates is another thing…

Raid 5 will give you the protection needed, but you must be diligent. Loosing more than 1 drive out of the array would not be good.

Controllers in Raid 5 are more than adequate, especially the new 3ware 9550. We can do HD, Raid 5 on 8 drives (actually less but we like overhead).
RGB 444 is a different story.

It’s our own app, but I know of plenty of companies doing this using Premiere as the editor.

Here is our info on the 24 drive system:
https://www.spectsoft.com/wiki/RaveManual/Products/RaveHD

Previous projects were using the same app but different systems. Everything from Fiber to SCSI to SATA. This system is being used for Ice Age 2 without issues.

Anyone doing HD is pretty much in the same league. The datarates are all the same. Our only difference is we address workflow issues that programs like Premiere and FCP don’t or can’t.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Bob Zelin]

Kev –
#1 – the Apple shop guys are idiots
#2 – there are very intelectual replys to your post on this thread, but lets face reality.

This stuff just came out. ATTO AINT READY. FIRMTEK AINT READY. SONNET AINT READY. You can TRY the Highpoint SATA card for PCIe (I wouldn’t), you can buy the current Apple XServe RAID with the PCIe card from Apple (which almost no one on this list would – and you probably can’t afford it), or you can stick a plain old FW800 drive in the FW800 port of the new MAC, and work on some stuff for now, until the new products come out. Fibre is great, SATA is very good and cheap – but THIS STUFF IS ALL NEW, and if you want SOLID ANSWERS, you ain’t gonna get it until this new stuff is released (or you blow your wad on the XServe RAID with the PCIe FC card from Apple) – like I said – if you do this, you are nuts.

bob Zelin