Andrew Richards
Forum Replies Created
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Today. Today, you are right. How much bandwidth do we need realistically?”
What do you want to do with it? For any one thing, 10Gb is a nice sized pipe. It is double what you will push with a small RAID like a Pegasus. It is a lot more than you will push for HD or 2K I/O (depending on the codec). But combine those two? You’re saturating the bus already. 10Gb is not nearly enough if you want an outboard GPU to give you all its got. Maybe all this 4K stuff is overkill, but if people want to work with it, they are going to need more than a single duplex 10Gb pipe to do it.
Even if Thunderbolt 2.0 (being based on PCIe 3.0) doubles throughput, you’re still way south of what multi-lane slots give you. As Mr. Soyka has said, expectations rise in proportion to capability.
Best,
Andy -
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Maybe I’m being naive, but isn’t Thunderbolt going to change computing/peripherals?”
It changes a lot for small form factor computers (which happen to be massively popular). I don’t see it being a step forward for towers though. PCIe slots are still capable of far more bandwidth. That doesn’t mean you wouldn’t put Thunderbolt on a tower, you still want to be able to use the same peripherals across all classes of computer. But Thunderbolt is not a replacement for PCIe. It is a wonderful leap beyond FireWire, USB, eSATA, and ExpressCard.
From my distant Internet vantage point, it looks like there is a lot of Thunderbolt at NAB this year.
Best,
Andy -
Not to mention modern filesystem technologies like concurrency, metadata written in the correct byte order, sub-second date precision, support for massive volume sizes, and sparse file support.
HFS+ might be the single biggest wart on OS X today. It really is a shame ZFS didn’t happen. The only filesystems I know of besides HFS+ that support hosting FCPX Events and Projects storage are Xsan and ExFAT.
Best,
Andy -
[Michael Hadley] “Any one with some real computer chops care to comment?”
There is some system overhead involved with interacting with a mounted disk image. Disk images are treated by the OS as any other mount, but they are still subject to the physical I/O limitations of the storage they are sitting on, which might also have other I/O going on.
In your case, you were multiplying that effect by calling multiple streams of media from a virtual disk and probably also trying to write back to the same physical disk (I’m assuming your Project storage is either on the same disk image or the same physical HDD). If you have a fast RAID or SSD, that might be able to overcome the bottleneck by brute force, but if you were doing that from a single HDD, the bottleneck could be pretty acute.
Best,
Andy -
Pull those T bars in the correct sequence and you can blow up a planet!
Best,
Andy -
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What is the nature of the work your new shop does? Tell us more.
Best,
Andy -
Perhaps Intel’s just announced lower cost 330 series SSD will be a nice complement to this.
Best,
Andy