Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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[Chris Murphy] “If you have a mitigation example for using Green drives in raid, that might be a useful qualification.”
MSS, RAIDZ, Linux RAID(6), Drobo BeyondRAID. I believe big cloud players use similar schemes (perhaps geographically distributed and with triple redundancy) that are would well mitigate the use of green drives – if they don’t already. I do know they use desktop drives – which of course invalidates their warranty, right?
[Chris Murphy] “USB stick RAID can be used where differences in their behavior is either irrelevant or well mitigated.”
First compostable water filters, now USB sticks. I take it, you’re trying to make the idea of using green drives in RAID sound outlandish? 🙂
You do have a point about potentially invalidating drives’ warranty and about the difference in cost being too minor. That changes nothing about mine.
Cheers.
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[Chris Murphy] “yet in the previous post your two questions insinuate that either the difference in firmware behavior is unimportant/meaningless, or that somehow WDC is acting immorally by charging more for different firmware behavior”
Point: green drives can be used where the difference in their behavior (with reds or other similar drives) is either irrelevant or well mitigated. Didn’t I say it three or four times already? If it still escapes you, perhaps contact me off list?
At price differences you mentioned – no point. When the price difference were to the tune of 30-50% (I think a year ago or so) – there clearly is a point.
Oh, and the fact that using green drives wasn’t the culprit in OP’s issue: did that point escape you too, or are you still out to make compostable water filters?
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[Chris Murphy] “You want to save $10-50 and get the exact wrong firmware behavior? Good luck with that, but I don’t see it as sticking it to the man when you make that choice, you’re sticking it to yourself.”
Sticking it to the man doesn’t mean shooting yourself in the foot. I never used Green drives in RAID and don’t plan to.
Sticking it to the man means you have to be smart about it and mitigate the adverse affects of using eco drives – smartly, not stupidly. All I said was – there’re ways to do it. Did you read my post? 🙂
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[Chris Murphy] “WDC explicitly proscribes the use of Green, Blue, and Black drives in anything other than raid1 or raid0. The Red’s are proscribed in arrays comprised of more than 4 disks. The RE’s are recommended for 5+ drive arrays.”
..and I thought WDC “proscribes” this (and cripples the firmware on Greens, Blues and Blacks) primarily because they want to sell pricier models, not because there is some other scientifically sound reason to? 🙂
Is Red anything but a Green with a slightly modified firmware that somehow costs $50 extra to the end user?
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Yes – as long as the eSATA card has Mac drivers. It might also need to support port-replication. This one does both.
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[Austin Baur] “I don’t really know what that means… it’s at this point I pull out my “student” card and throw my hands up. I can tell you though that I know I’ll be working a lot with Sony EX’s and DSLR’s.”
Go to manufacturer specs for the camera and look at recording rates, usually in Mbit/s. For EX and dSLRs, I believe the numbers are around 35Mbit/s (same as Mb/s but not the same as MB/s – confusing, eh?). Divide that Mb/s number by 8, and you get a rough data rate in MBs (MegaBytes per second) – more common with hard drives. 35Mbs translates to about 4-5MB/s so there’s plenty of headroom in terms of transfer rates, with most external and internal drives.
In other words, you should be fine with any software (Adobe Premiere Pro, FCPX) that doesn’t have to convert the media into another, higher bandwidth format (like ProRes). Alhtough even when it does, like FCP7, the data rates are still low enough for a single drive to handle them.
HTH.
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[Austin Baur] “What about for 1080p media?”
Can you find out what the datarates of that 1080p media will be?
Another thing to look at, is the nesting complexity of your timelines (number of video tracks at any point on the timeline), and whether you will be encoding or exporting a lot.
Yet another factor to look at, is your personal sensitivity to system’s responsiveness. Mine is fairly high, so I have to have a fast system (and fast storage) no matter what. 🙂
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I usually agree with Rainer – but not in this case. I worked with G-Tech since they were called Medea. While not all G-Speed products were absolutely stellar (HiPoint controllers aren’t exactly top tier), G-Speed eS Pro is so simple, it’s hard to find fault with it. It’s an external backplane with a 3rd party controller (ATTO R680), and it’s nearly guaranteed that if you take the drives out of the eS Pro and put them in a different (but similar technically) enclosure while using the same controller, the issue will not go away.
The issue is about 99% between the OS and its file system, ATTO controller, its driver and configuration, and the drives. The box itself is highly unlikely to be a major player in it. It’s also supported by thousands of eS Pro boxes being used out there 24/7.
(Sorry to disagree with you Rainer. I may end up eating my words. :))
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[Austin Baur] “So in regards to my third question, how should I deal with external media storage? Will storing all of my raw files on a USB 3.0 drive really slow me down in editing, even if offline?”
Epic camera up to 5K resolutions, correct? There’s a variety of frame rates and compression levels starting from under 100MB/s (that’s megabytes/s) all the way to 450MB/s. A single spinning drive, USB3.0 or not will only work with a small subset of these datarates.
You’d probably need a ProAvio EB400CR for that, or even something heftier.
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[Austin Baur] “First, the reviews online are bipolar. Should I go for the Samsung 840 Pro or the new OCZ Vector? Or even a OCZ Vertex 4?”
Not gonna make much of a difference unless you spring for yet a newer model that supports NVMe SSDs – those run at close to 1GB/s. Even then – the SSD as a boot/OS/apps drive makes a HUGE (several orders of magnitude) difference in response times compared to spinning drives – and significant but not so huge – in transfer speeds. Any of the top tier SSDs will work, and the difference between them won’t be all that noticeable.
I’d look for reliability and longevity: Intel 520 and S3500, Samsung 840 Pro. Downtime is way costlier than a slight difference in performance.