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The relationship between speed and storage capacity. Advice on building raid arrays for 2 small edit bays
We are in need of storage solutions for our small production shop. We do a range of work from high end projects shot on RED and generally transcoded to Pro Res 444 to a large amount of work on DSLRS done in Pro Res LT. We also Grade in house and in the future will be building a 1080 Resolve suite.
We currently hav 2 edit bays. A 2010 Macpro quad core with a bunch of ram and a 2010 I mac. Our plan in the future will be to make the 2010 macpro our 2nd edit bay and get a new mac pro.
Basically this is the situation, We have long term projects often shot on lower end formats that dont require much speed to edit and at the same time we have projects that go pro res 444 and maybe higher end then that in the future, but they are smaller one offs with no more then 1-2TB of data. Trying to be as cost effective as possible is there any reliable higher volume raid solutions (8-16TB) that dont give me that much speed and may offer an output like FW-800 and Esata…..Basically something like the Caldigit VR2 but high volume…we only need about 150 MB/s max and then I can get a smaller solution for our higher end projects in the 4TB range.
The other option is just get one bigger faster solution like a caldigit HDone or element and then a VRII for our Imac….but I was trying to be a bit more cost effective if possible.
I donno if this exists of course as it seems to me there is a correlation between the amount of storage and speed also going up….as it seems more bay = more speed right?
Thanks for the help!
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1 Reply
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When you’re talking shared storage (over AFP, Samba etc), the clients can’t cache much. They have to let the server do that. So data needs to get to the server or from the server in a narrow window to make the frame rate.
Our own testing from a while ago showed you needed about 8 spindles to reliably capture Pro Res HQ. Obviously, things are changing now with front end caching and improved apps. Apple multithreaded their TCP stack as well.
Ultimately, it’s not about the size of the raid, it’s about the number of spindles. However if you get into buying enough spindles, you’ll often find that buying smaller drives to save money doesn’t save you much, so you’ll want to get the larger drives anyhow.
Steve
Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications
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