Storage with Kona 2

[Walter Biscardi]

[Steven Escobar] “I just bought a Kona 2 card for an HDCAM project I want to online. It’s an 85 minute feature and I want to purchase some drives that will last me a couple of years but I don’t want to spend more than $4000 if possible.”

You want to do 10bit HDCAM, yet you don’t want to spend $4,000 for drives on an 85 minute feature? Tough call there.

SATA is the new kid on the block but I would not trust it for a major feature. Go Fibre Channel and go Medea. They have not failed me in 8 years and I would not trust any other drive manufacturer with an uncompressed HD project.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” 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

[Gary Adcock]

[Steven Escobar] “I just bought a Kona 2 card for an HDCAM project I want to online. It’s an 85 minute feature and I want to purchase some drives that will last me a couple of years but I don’t want to spend more than $4000 if possible.”

OK lets look at the numbers 1080 29.97 is about 170 mgs per second.
when you take into account that you will most likely have at least a 2:1 ratio of footage to final content at full rez for the Online PLUS renders for audio and video, graphics etc.
My rule in HD isthe storage needs to be 5x the length of the final project.
So 85 minutes x 1080 29.97 10bit x 5 looks like about 4.2T

Even SATA is not that cheap. Look to spend about $7K min.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD and Film Consultation

[Bob Zelin]

Walter states –
You want to do 10bit HDCAM, yet you don’t want to spend $4,000 for drives on an 85 minute feature? Tough call there.

Walter is SO politically correct. I would have definately insulted you here, for the same reason. You are doing a FEATURE – a LONG feature – it costs money to do this. You DO want 10 bit uncompressed HD Cam – right? You AINT getting this for $4000.

The Medea is good, as Walter states, and I LOVE the HUGE U320RX, but you will need a LOT of storage, and it’s going to be over 10 grand.

If you want to use SATA, you better be ready for possible unstability. The only tested way to do uncompressed 10 bit HD SDI with SATA is with a Sonnet Tempo X eSATA 8 port card, with 8 SATA drives (400 gig drives, but you can get the 500’s now). This package is RAID 0 ONLY – no Raid protection, so when one drive fails in the middle of your movie, you will lose ALL OF YOUR FOOTAGE. Combine this with the instability of a system like this, and well, you are on your own. ProMax can sell you this turnkey package with the Kano enclosures. And it does work. I use SATA on almost every system, with this very Sonnet card, but I usually don’t use more than 2 drives, giving plenty of open ports on the Sonnet card to stick in a couple more drives to use as backup drives. The DR Group will provide a similar package with the Highpoint 8 port SATA card, and the Cremax enclosures. You can do uncompressed with this too, but with no RAID protection. If it were my neck on the line FOR A FEATURE, I would not want to risk it.

Of course, you can simply OFFLINE with SATA or Firewire 800, and CONFORM the movie with this SATA uncompressed array later. This way, if you do have failure or instability, it’s not that big of a deal. The movie has been cut, you have the list, and you can always go back and redigitize the 85 minutes of HD that you need.

Nothing wrong with the DVCProHD codec for HD – certainly for a HD offline, and this, you can use ANY DAMN DRIVES, including what you own right now.

Bob Zelin

[Walter Biscardi]

[Bob Zelin] “The Medea is good, as Walter states, and I LOVE the HUGE U320RX, but you will need a LOT of storage, and it’s going to be over 10 grand.”

Yep, $10k or so is what I would expect. I’m pretty sure my FCR2X was around $8k when I bought it and that was 2TB. I really want to step up to the 4GB Fibre Channel arrays soon though.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” 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

[Ramona Howard]

I’m going to jump in . Let me first say that I respect both of you guys very much and I’m not here to stir it up BUT I wanted to clarify that SATA under the right circumstances has proven to be very stable.

We have been doing it for sometime now and it works great for every format. Sata has been used in the storage industry for awhile(it’s not something that just appeared 6 months ago) and it has moved over to the video I/O side of things very well. Let me add that it’s not for the meek as is most of the stuff we deal with in this industry and you guys are 100% correct in that even though it’s less expensive than SCSI and Fiber, it’s not $4000. Be prepared to spend some money if your looking to online your entire feature at once!

The nice thing is that in order to get the thru-put with SATA for 4:4:4, you need drives, and with drives you get the space so it really is a good choice if those are your needs. If you are needing thruput but less storage, SCSI and Fiber would be a better choice(less heads spinning).

We have done 4:4:4 on SCSI, SATA, Fiber and certified both Medea and Huge(not all models will do 4:4:4),and honestly it all works, it just depends on how much you want to spend and what your specific needs are.

I know you guys are big Mac users but this industry is not all Mac. It’s a happy mix of Windows, Mac and us over here on the Linux side. Not a single studio that I know of is 100% on one OS(well unless your Dreamworks), and many of them are using SATA succesfully. A statement that SATA is unstable is unfair, maybe SATA on Mac is unstable would have been better, but I bet there are some that would argue with that one also.

I think this guy simply needs to be made aware that $4,000 isn’t going to come close and given options to check into, and there are alot of options!

Cheers to all,
Ramona

[Steve Swersky]

HI all..With my recent experience cutting a feature I think a SATA array is the way to go. Yet it will cost @ $10,000. I use an Enhanced Technology UltraStor 320 array using 16 400gig SATA drives (5.6Tb) striped Raid 5,0 with the ATTO UL4D card and the KONA test says it runs about 400megs a second more than enough speed for 10bit uncompressed HD. As far as how much storage you’ll need, here are some real numbers:

My offline storage was around 800gigs, in the DVCPRO HD format (about 42 tapes).
My online storage at 1080i 10bit uncompressed was around 900gigs for a 97 min feature.

Keep in mind i was storing both my offline and online footage on the same drive so that i would have a reference if need be. It’s also because the offline audio is used for the final OMF output.

Also, having a drive of this size allows me the opportunity to take on other jobs at the same time. It would not be a wise decision to limit myself to one project only at a time.

If $$$ is really, really an issue I would reccomend that for something like this you should get at least a 3.2Tb array. This will probably cost around $7500 but might leave you without extra storage for renders etc.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Ramona Howard] “I know you guys are big Mac users but this industry is not all Mac. It’s a happy mix of Windows, Mac and us over here on the Linux side. Not a single studio that I know of is 100% on one OS(well unless your Dreamworks), and many of them are using SATA succesfully. A statement that SATA is unstable is unfair, maybe SATA on Mac is unstable would have been better, but I bet there are some that would argue with that one also.”

Well, considering the Kona 2 is a Mac product, then Mac is the OS we’re discussing over here. I know some folks who love their SATA arrays on Mac and others who do not. I simply don’t trust it yet to throw at a major project unless I have a chance to run it through some paces first. I’m actually going to be testing some SATA products soon, but they won’t go into major production for at least 2 to 3 months if I like them.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” 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]

Hey Gang,

For what it is worth I just went with a HUge 420 4GIG FIber channel drive and an ATTO Celerity card. The 4 TB drive was expensive and in a riad three you loose about 1TB of storage. At 80% capacity I was looking at 380MB/sec. The drive is a tank, it weighs 100 pounds it has dual power spplies and dual fiber.

I looked at it as a future proofing purchase. I looked hard at SATA Raids too but after my IDE drive experiences in OSX I wanted to go with something very relaible, with redundancy build it because recapturing a few terabytes of material is not a one day thing. That’s many hours on those drives and I want that to be protected storage.

Very reliable, very fast and not much more than a SATA riad.

David

[Ramona Howard]

Walter,

Yes the Kona2 is considered a Mac product but has worked well for us on the Linux side. Now that AJA has announced the new Xena2, which is the OEM version of the (Mac)Kona2 but for the PC, we will begin using this and really only because it offers more features geared towards the high-end studios(we have been very, very happy using the Kona 2). From our perspective we really don’t look at the boards as Mac or PC, since we wrote the driver we can use both sucessfully, in fact switching from Kona to Xena without having to do anything.

I try to only jump in when I feel it necessary since MOST of what is discussed is on the Mac OS but every now and then issues do arise that it is important to point out that it is not hardware and possibly an OS or software issue. We wouldn’t want people getting the wrong idea about how the hardware actually works or how good it works and that it’s up to the software to take advantage of it.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Bob Zelin]

Ramona –
since I love to cause trouble, I would like to challange your statement. You state that SATA is extremely stable. The instability of SATA is not based on drive failure – it is based on the horrible design of SATA 1 and eSATA or SATA 2 connectors. Certainly, the very MAC G5 that we all work on is based on a SATA drive, but the EXTERNAL DRIVE ENCLOSURES that are available from most manufacturers, as well as the SATA Host controllers, are extremely poor. THEY DONT BREAK Ramona, but the actual connections are poor. I use 8 port SATA cards all the time, and it’s a pain to get most of the ports functional, based on cable seating, and the cables coming loose (think USB, but worse). I have had wonderful success with Firmtek products (all SATA 1), but they don’t offer an 8 port card, and thus, you can’t do uncompressed HD with the Firmtek Host adaptor. To say that “it’s stable, it works”, is in my opinion, an irresponsible statement. I too have gotten it to work, but you move it to a client location, and maybe it doesn’t work, and you spend 2 hours plugging and unplugging cables, to try to get the SATA drives to mount. THANK GOD that these Host card manufacturers have written automount firmware, because before the automount firmware, you had no idea if the drive cable was seated correctly. You would have to replug, and reboot, and MAYBE you would get lucky.

Is it cable design, is it the actual connectors – I don’t know, and it’s not my job to figure it out. I use SATA now on almost every install, but because I can NEVER rely on ALL EIGHT DRIVES to mount, I will currently not use SATA for uncompressed HD systems that would require all 8 drives to be operational. Again, if I am willing to sit on a bench, and wiggle the cables, and get the card seated JUST RIGHT, I can get all 8 drives up, but if it’s in a rack, with a million other cables putting strain on
the SATA cables, I know that it will stop working in a few days. People messing around behind racks is just a fact of life.

So why do I put up with this ? Because where else can you get 800 Gigs of storage
that can do 8 bit 10 bit SDI uncomressed and DVCProHD for under $900.

Bob Zelin