Eric Hansen
Forum Replies Created
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Are you looking for active near-line, or as working volumes?
As an active near-line setup, I believe you are correct, the 8-bay TB RAID from Areca with quality drives is the sweet spot. The price amazes me.
But as active work volumes, there’s a few things to keep in mind. The tests at Barefeats show the 8 bay Areca maxing out at 900MB/s, demonstrating that this is more or less the practical speed limit for a single TB1 connection. If you daisy chain a bunch of RAIDs over this connection, that 900MB/s has to be shared, which could get ugly depending on what you’re trying to do. If you want to share these volumes out to ethernet connected clients, you could run out of bandwidth if you have too many people hitting the storage. TB doesn’t scale nearly as well as SAS for this use. SAS has higher speed limits (depending on the cards) and there’s the ability to put multiple cards in a single server.
but if the 900MB/s speed limit isn’t an issue, i don’t think you can do much better. Thunderbolt is nice and clean. But dealing with daisy-chained Thunderbolt drives is bringing back awful memories of daisy-chained FW800 drives, 6-10 sitting on a desk, trying to figure out which are plugged in, and in which order. I haven’t worked with more than 4 TB drives connected, and not long enough to comment on connection reliability. But hopefully TB is much better than FW800.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
The problem isn’t that the 23 year old kick ass Jack Of All Trades took the job for $28k a year. The problem is that he graduated from Full Sail $100k in debt, lives in his proud parents’ basement, was one of 2568 applicants for that job and was lucky to even land an interview.
And then he celebrated his new job by putting a new 55″ Plasma TV on his Visa.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
i second the “network time server” suggestion. personally, i don’t keep the Media Cache files on the SAN next to the media, even though that’s the recommendation. i don’t like how Pr spits files all over my nice organized footage. I’m usually writing LTO tapes from the same SAN location, so i have to delete all those temp files before writing LTOs, which is a pain.
with CUDA, we have to turn it off on all edit systems. when it’s on, we don’t get real-time playback through Kona or BMD cards. turn it off and playback is fine. i’m hoping this is fixed in CC. if not using a Kona, BMD or similar card, playback is fine with CUDA on.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
did you try calling instead of emailing?
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
Only a third faster going from 480 to 680? I guess I’ll stick with my 570 2.5GB a bit longer
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
In my experience, it doesn’t matter for standard grading. If you get real-time playback in your NLE, then your RAID is fast enough for grading.
An exception to this is the Render Cache. Resolve will render DPX files into the cache so you can speed up playback on systems with low GPU processing. This is great for my home system, which has a single GTX570 card. Since the cache is DPX, you will need about 250-300MB/s write/read speed for 1080 material. on my Mac Pro, i put four 2TB drives in the four bays and put them in a software RAID0. I get 350-450MB/s, so it works great. If i had more GPUs, I wouldn’t need this cache. My office system doesn’t have a cache.
now, if you’re talking about a server (you wrote “raid/server”), that’s different.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
sure. get a Mac Mini, a Small Tree Thundernet box with four 1GbE ports and share them to your workstations. for a bit more money, you could instead get a 10GbE Thundernet box and a 10GbE switch from Netgear.
keep in mind that four 1GbE connections (or a 10GbE connection) to an R4 will push it to its limits, so i wouldn’t expect enough bandwidth for 4 concurrent editors, especially multi-cam. something like an Areca 8050 with 8 drives would be much better. but if you’re asking if it’s possible, the answer is yes. is it ideal and reliable, no.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
I may be wrong here, but wasn’t the speed difference almost negligible?
thinking about an app like After Effects, having 32GB of RAM is way more important than having 24GB running slightly faster. when using After Effects, I wish I had way more than the 40GB I have now.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
why did BMD recommend against 32GB of RAM??
my 2 main Resolve Mac Pros have 40GB and 52GB with no issues.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
man, i can’t wait to build and test one of these setups
Steve, a few questions:
– Barefeats got the Areca 8050 up to 900MB/s. it stayed there in a few different configs (RAID0, RAID5, etc), so that looks to more or less be the limit for TB1. Now, I may be totally wrong here, but with TB1, doesn’t that mean the storage is using a single 10Gb lane of the 2 available on the port? would that mean that a 10GbE card on the same TB1 port (daisy chained) would use the second 10Gb channel? thus the drive would still keep hitting 900MB/s while the 10GbE card will go as fast as the 10Gb channel allows?
– in your Adobe demo, you say “Thunderbolt 1 forced me to use 2 10Gb ports to go that fast”. does that mean you used two Thundernet boxes and bonded them in System Prefs to hit 1GBs? if so, does that mean 10GbE bonding works differently than 1GbE bonding, where you can’t actually increase speed with bonding unless there’s something “smart” controlling it, like Avid ISIS?
Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv