• Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

  What Drives do I need for High Definition?

  Posted by Creative Cow on August 10, 2009 at 3:58 pm

  First you need to determine what form of High Definition you plan to edit.

  For compressed formats like DVCPro HD and HDV, simple Firewire 800 drives or multiple internal drives striped together will work just fine. Manufacturers recommend by Cow Users are WeibeTech, LaCie, CalDigit, Other World Computing, Western Digital, G-Tech.

  For ProRes, Firewire 800 will work, but generally SATA arrays and at least three drives striped internally are better. ProRes has a higher data rate than any of the other compressed HD formats. SATA Array manufacturers recommended by Cow Users include MaxxDigital, Dulce, CalDigit, G-Tech, and Sonnet. Some users also build their own using off the shelf enclosures with Hitachi, Western Digital and Seagate bare drives.

  For Uncompressed HD, you need a high speed array that can run at at least 200MB/s sustained data rate, but 300MB/s and up is even better. Generally a minimum of 5 drives striped together is the bare minimum required to attain this type of sustained speed, though most folks use 8 or more. SATA and FibreChannel arrays are recommended for Uncompressed editing. In addition to the SATA Array manufacturers listed above, FibreChannel array manufacturers recommended by Cow users include Facilis, Ciprico and Dulce.

  Keep in mind that when you run high speed media arrays, failure of a drive is always a very real possibility. All drives will fail eventually. This is why we recommend you get arrays that can support RAID 5 so in the event of a drive failure, a backup drive will kick in and you can keep working.

  Also, understand that the higher your overhead in speed, the more realtime capabilities you give your system. So a media array that runs at 500MB/s will give you a lot more realtime than a media array that runs at 200MB/s no matter what format you’re working with. More speed means more streams of data can run at the same time. So you can run more video tracks, more video filters, more audio tracks and the like. So even if you’re editing in DVCPro HD, getting a high speed SATA array running 350MB/s or faster will yield much more realtime than a 2 drive FW800 array. They will both work, but you can work more efficiently with the higher speed array.

  Creative Cow replied 17 years, 1 month ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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