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Two new Mac Pros, two Thunderbolt 2 RAIDs, one Thunderbolt Bridge ….
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The nMP has three (3) separate thunderbolt buses. Did you attach each of the high bandwidth devices to separate buses?
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Valid point, Jack … but I already knew about the bus config and kept the Thunderbolt Bridge cable on Bus 2 and the Tbolt2 RAIDs on BUS 1 and the monitors on Bus 0.
I even tried with the TB2 Bridge and the TB2 DAS on the same bus to see if the nMP 3 x bus config was acting as some kind of internal switch which was adding “choppiness” when transferring packets from one bus to the other but that had no impact on overall consistency.
Also, has anyone managed to get Compressor 4.1 to work over Tbolt2 bridging yet? … that would be a sweet way to set up a nMP render farm if it works … but just can’t seem to get it working between 2 x nMPs and a TB2 MBP.
Very impressed with the performance of the ARECA TB2 8 x bay RAID … consistently getting over 1000 MB/s WRITE and 1100 MB/s READ speeds in RAID 5 … they’re going to get me their 16 x bay Tbolt2 enclosure next week to test … think we should see speeds up around 1500 MB/s if Areca engineers manage to work their magic with their drivers.
Am at CES in Vegas now and it definitely looks like 4K is the next BIG THING (well according to the TV vendors anyway) …. Apple is well positioned to capitalize on 4K workflow with the nMP and FCPX 10.1 and Logic Pro X plus Resolve 10.1 which are all optimized for the new 64 architecture and dual GPUs … really hope that Apple put some engineering resource into fixing the data flow over TB2 bridging.
Neil
Neil Smith
CEO
LumaForge LLC
fast data
323-850-3550
http://www.lumaforge.com -
Are your tests with full drives or <50% full drives.
I’m interested in reading whether your measures are so good because you’re only using the outer partition on the platters,.. or conversely, what improvement you might get if you DID ensure you were doing so.
Thanks for the sharing of your experience (and pics!).
I can’t WAIT to get my hands on an ARC-8050v2 TB2 device (and would love them forever if they think to include a lowly usb3 justincase interface as on their 5026 device)(dare I wish for a micro-SAS hole too?).cheers from Switzerland,
Shawn Koppenhoefer -
Testing was done on mainly empty RAIDs but then also with about 6 TBs of 4K footage … when I get back from CES will fill them up to 80% and see what happens.
ARECA will be delivering a 16 bay Tbolt 2 enclosure next week so I’ll put that through its paces … have a feeling that we’ll see sustained throughput go up to around 1500 MB/s Read&Write – the more spinning spindles the better.
We’ll publish prices for the ARECA 8 bay Tbolt2 RAID next week and they should start shipping units around the end of the month.
We’ll be demoing the Tbolt2 RAIDs in action with the nMPs at Larry Jordan’s FCP X 10.1 Training Day in Burbank on Tuesday Jan 14th and at Michael Horton’s Jan LACPUG meeting on 22nd:
https://www.larryjordan.biz/powerup-4k-in-fcpx/
https://www.lafcpug.org/user_schedule.html
Saw something of interest on the Intel booth yesterday at CES … Lacie had a 1TB flash drive attached to a Tbolt2 PC and they were getting around 1000 MB/s R&W on the BMD speed test … nice small compact unit that will make a nifty shuttle drive from on-set back to post … plug it into a nMP and Bob’s your uncle … transfer a terabyte of data in under 20 minutes … will test as soon as they ship me one.
CES is all about 4K/UHDTV this year … UHDTV panels all over the place … all they need now is some engaging 4K content and we should see adoption rates start to ramp up.
One really cool thing I did see on the Display Port booth was 3 x 4K TVs attached to a flight simulator! … they had some young dude flying Spitfires across the Kent country side … with three 50 inch UHDTV panels and 60 KHz refresh rate, man oh man, was it immersive … know what Santa needs to bring me for next Christmas 🙂
Neil
Neil Smith
CEO
LumaForge LLC
fast data
323-850-3550
http://www.lumaforge.com -
So, I guess my question, is back to your original post. I am doing a job where I will be editing on set. But I have an assistant downloading the footage.
We both will be using Thunderbolt 2 compatible computers. What is the best RAID to put between us. He will literally just be ingesting and organizing. I will then grab and color and cut down and output to a separate drive.
Would the Pegasus work as the bridge between or no? I just need simultaneous access to files he has already organize. -
One aside.
How come you have a Quantel colourist panel working with FCP? Or is it just incidentally there?
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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India -
Eli,
If I understand your question correctly, I think you’re suggesting something that is not a good thing to do … i.e., you want to connect two Macs at the same time to one Thunderbolt 2 RAID enclosure. The issue you’re facing isn’t so much a Tbolt connectivity problem, it’s more to do with maintaining the integrity of the Directory Structure on the RAID file system.
I’m assuming you’d have the RAID formatted with HFS+ which is designed to only have one Mac writing and reading to it at a time … if you connect two Macs to the same RAID which one is the master in charge of maintaining the Directory Tree Structure? I haven’t tried it personally but I suspect that you will find that the Directory gets corrupted pretty quickly and neither machine will be able to Read or Write to the drive. Data is not written directly to the physical drive but to the logical layer that manages the directory of where all the bits and bytes are written to … in this case HFS+ which is not designed to have multiple hosts writing to the same physical drive at the same time.
The safer option is to attach the RAID to the assistant’s MBP and then for you to use IP over Thunderbolt bridging to connect directly to his MBP and then mount the RAID on your desktop … that way you can work on the files on the RAID and his MBP will be maintaining the Directory Structure.
As long as you alway unmount the RAID from his machine first, you could then also directly attach the RAID to your machine safely.
Hope that makes sense.
Neil
Neil Smith
CEO
LumaForge LLC
fast data
323-850-3550
http://www.lumaforge.com -
Well spotted! … and yes, it’s not attached to the nMPs but to a PABLO RIO PC … the NEO panel just happens to be in the middle of the desk in front of the HD SDI monitor I’m using for color grading. I have the two new Mac Pros either side of it due to space limitations.
One of the things I’m testing in the Workflow Integration Lab are the different options for connecting the PC world to the Mac Thunderbolt world using devices like the MAGMA Tbolt 2 PCIe expansion chassis with 10 GbE Myricom cards.
One way to share files and data between the PC world and Mac world is to use Xsan or metaSAN which work very well but require a FC switch in the topology … 10GbE is an efficient means to do file transfer between Macs and PCs but you end up having duplicate data on both NTFS and HFS+ sides.
What I’m ideally looking for is a way to color correct in the PABLO RIO PC world and then render out directly to ProRes Quicktimes in the Mac world without having to copy the DPX files over to the Apple RAIDs.
All suggestions welcome.
Neil
Neil Smith
CEO
LumaForge LLC
fast data
323-850-3550
http://www.lumaforge.com -
[Neil Smith] “What I’m ideally looking for is a way to color correct in the PABLO RIO PC world and then render out directly to ProRes Quicktimes in the Mac world without having to copy the DPX files over to the Apple RAIDs.”
But there’s no way – on a Win PC – to render out as ProRes from within any app, like Rio, for instance. You could probably export as SStP and then use Resolve on Mac to convert to ProRes.
Or, consider exporting to DPX on Rio and then GlueTools to use DPX sequences directly inside FCP. With the kind of bandwidth you have from the Promise or Areca over TBolt 2, you’ll be able to play back Hd or 2k res DPX-QTs in real time.
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Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India -
Would it be better to build a server? That way we could both pull off the shared drives? Would that be fast enough?
Have you done anything with the Mac Mini Servers from sonnet? Seems like an okay option
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