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Why not just go with MacGuru’s box and a Sonnet card for eSATA?
In Jan 2005 I put together a MacGurus burly box of 4, 400 gig Hitachi drives
and a Sonnet 4+4 card in my G5 dual 2.5 gig Mac. I have had ZERO failures
with it running 24/7 for two and a half years. I get great uncompressed
and DV performance using my Aurora Pipe Studio system, God rest their soul.
Anyway, I was at NAB and saw all these people with their fancy dancy
boxes and markup prices just so they can put the drives in the their boxes
and provide a card. Now, with all the talk about CalDigit not being as good
as people thought, why the heck don’t we just do what I did and build your own?I’m moving our systems to HD this summer and drives are all going to be replaced.
I looked at many different systems at NAB and they all looked the same.
It seems the only thing that separates them is whether they will hold up long term.
Well, how the heck can you know that going in, if these are new boxes and
new configs? You can’t. So why not pick drives you can trust, a black box you can
trust, and a card you can trust? Put it together yourself.It’s like the pet food scare. If people hadn’t been so hypnotized by the pet food
industry and the idea you HAD TO buy food for your cat and dog from a bag or can,
then people would have been making their own pet food like people had been
doing for centuries and still do in other countries. But here, we actually think
store bought pet food is the only thing you can feed your pet. It’s insane.eSATA is a great technology for individual workstation storage.
There is nothing exotic about putting a bunch of drives in a box with some fans
and attaching it to a card in your Mac Pro. Absolutely nothing strange about it.
Yes or no?Dan
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12 Replies
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Nobody said you had to buy a pre-configured RAID. The choice is yours.
Caldigit, Gtech and others have been certified to work for uncompressed HD.
FYI, all drives will fail. Have a backup plan.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Director-At-Large
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
We use one and it flies with uncompressed HD – we just make sure as much as possible is backed up because without RAID 5 we are going to get a problem at some point!
I’m happy to take the risk for the lower cost – however having said that, Apples ProRes may just have changed the game as far as storage goes.
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Most of the RAIDs shown at NAB were hardware RAIDs. Here is what I found at Ask.com:
Hardware RAID
The hardware-based system manages the RAID subsystem independently from the host and presents to the host only a single disk per RAID array. An external RAID system moves all RAID handling “intelligence” into a controller located in the external disk subsystem. The whole subsystem is connected to the host via a normal controller and appears to the host as a single disk.Software RAID
Software RAID implements the various RAID levels in the kernel disk (block device) code. It offers the cheapest possible solution, as expensive disk controller cards or hot-swap chassis [1] are not required. With today’s fast CPUs, Software RAID performance can excel against Hardware RAID. The performance of a software-based array is dependent on the server CPU performance and load.So it seems that if critical performance is required you would opt for a more expensive software RAID. There is more loading on the processors in a software RAID system (JBOD) and I would guess that the more drives in the JBOD the more load there is to manage the handling of data to each drive.
I built a four-drive Ultra 320 SCSI JBOD RAID on a dual channel ATTO card and I get great performance. But not as good as a true hardware RAID. It has served its purpose however.
In our G5 dual 2.7 ppc’s we have the Jive block with three drives across a Sonnett card. These have performed flawlessly with DVCPro50 and uncompressed SD….I can even run DVCProHD without a hiccup.
Still, the hardware RAIDs do more of the work for they system and therefore more of the processing cycles go to the app you are using. In HD applications where we are trying to get maximum throughput and as much realtime as possible the hardware RAID might just give you the performance boost you need.
That being said, I will probably build a 5 drive JBOD with a Sonnett card for our DVCProHD editing…
Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media -
DVCProHD is pretty easy to deal with in my opinion. We edited, did effects, color correction, etc, on a DVCProHD short this past summer and most of it required no rendering using only a single drive (i.e. not raided) firewire 800 drive. It was SO much easier than working with uncompressed 10 bit SD that I can’t even begin to describe, and it looked infinitely better as well. So I wouldn’t think you’d need a very fancy RAID to get nice performance from DVCProHD material.
Back to the original post, I hadn’t heard anything derogatory said about Caldigit lately. Actually, the review here by Bob Zelin was incredibly favorable:From this review I think if I had to buy a RAID today I’d get definitely get a Cal Digit FASTA-4e card and either one of their ready to go RAIDs (and get the full tech support set up), or possibly go the mixed tech support route and get a Fusion 500P or an EnhanceBox E8 that you can read the review of here:
https://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/enhance/e8/
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I just found the thread below about the problems with Caldigit. Sorry about that. Guess that’s what I get for reading from the newest to the older posts rather than in reverse.
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Just returned from NAB looking for a RAID. AJA booth recommended a SCSI hardware interfaced box filled with Hitachi or Seagate Sata drives and Atto SCSI card — much more robust than a straight SATA set up and much less expensive than fibre channel– with the protection of RAID 5. Software based raids (I think this is the only way to get RAID 5 out of a non hardware based raid) can take hits on the the system processor and actually degrade the image. Another bonus for SCSI–you can interface with a LTO-3 tape backup.
You might also want to check out the new SAS boxes and ATTO SAS card. 3X faster that SCSI, AJA has not testing SAS yet, and and still advises going with the SCSI set up. -
[James Mulryan] “Software based raids (I think this is the only way to get RAID 5 out of a non hardware based raid)”
Nope, there’s no such thing as software Raid-5. The only software raids are Raid-0 and Raid-1.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles -
Okay, now I am confused. In this review:
https://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/enhance/e8/
…they talk about using an EnhanceBox E8-ML with a RocketRAID 2322 card into a G5 and running a Raid 5. They talk about how the RocketRAID 2322 supports Raid 5, but I thought as this isn’t built into the EnhanceBox E8 itself that this qualified as a software raid.
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[mus man] “I thought as this isn’t built into the EnhanceBox E8 itself that this qualified as a software raid.”
Nope, the Raid-5 capability is a built into the chipset onboard the Rocket Raid card. That qualifies as a hardware raid.
Software raids are created in software such as Apple Disk Utility, which is only capable of creating striped sets running raid-0 or raid-1.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Post-production Supervisor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles -
I’ve been having a massive discussion about this at the apple forums
https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4495496#4495496.Basically i’m looking for a solution (as cheap as possible) that can easily support one 2K stream or multiple HD streams on a Mac pro – and with raid5.
the rocketraid cards (2322 for Multi-channel, or 2314 for port multiplied) seem the way to go, in addition with an enclosure (or more) like the Enhancebox E5, E8, E10, Sonnet Fusion 500P etc. You can get amazing performance and capacity for quite good prices.
If anyone is interested they should check out the post as I’m sure it could be useful to some…
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