[Frank Gothmann]

Herb, I feel your pain.
Why don’t you look at a FiiO X5. Much better feature set than the iPod, higher capacity and also expandable in the future.
https://www.fiio.net/en/products/2

Since iTunes audio doesn`t have DRM anymore all your purchased stuff should work without issues (it handles AAC as well but also does all the loseless formats).

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“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
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[Frank Gothmann]

It depends what you need it to do. With higher frame rates and interlaced content it does a good job (not perfect).
On the hardware side, Snell’s Alchemist and Kudos converters give superior output but cost a lot more.
One the software side, Tachyon and Alchemist OD give superior output (also cost more)

With slow frame rate conversions (24-25 etc.) it has very noticable problems and wouldn’t pass very demanding QC.
All hardware converters have problems there, you’re only option is either speedup or, if that’s not acceptable Tachyon or Alchemist OD.

Reverse Pulldown, depending on your source footage, can also create problems sometimes. Here, Tachyon shines.

For the price, is is a very, very good converter. But don’t expect miracles. If you need to create a transparent conversion from 1080 23.98psf to PAL SD (for DVD for example) and you’re in the feature film business… forget it.

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“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
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[Frank Gothmann]

Since you’re already using a Hackintosh you may as well try booting under windows. HP’s LTFS and LTO drives work ok with your card under Win7.
LTFS also works on the Mac, it’s just not great and slow to use because of the way the OSX finder handles things (wanting to generate thumbnails for your files, under Win this feature is disabled for LTFS volumes so navigating folders is a breeze).

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
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[Frank Gothmann]

It would be perfectly usable at x4 with a bit of a performance hit. However, check your mb manual how those slots are actually shared among each other, especially since they all will be populated. Just to be sure.
i7 is a good choice, especially the extreme edition because it can provide enough pci bandwith for 5+ slots.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
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[Frank Gothmann]

Problem is that this slot seems to share bandwith with your other slots. One of your GPUs is already running at only half speed at x8. Not a problem since it’s for processing only, not gaming etc, but a modern raid card is x8 so it all get’s a bit much.
For a multi-GPU system I’d go with something like:
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P9X79E_WS/
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DRG-QF.cfm
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DAi.cfm

Of course, those are all socket 2011 boards and I doubt you want to upgrade everything.
So the Gigabyte board you listed will also be fine.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement

[Frank Gothmann]

You have very beefy GPUs in your system but it looks as if you’re starved with PCIe slots. Maybe an upgrade would be useful here to make the most of all your gear and a future raid card. I don’t have any experience with the Stardom products. The Atto is a very nice card, too.
I nevertheless prefer Areca. We have eight of their cards in use and they have never given me a single issue in all those years.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
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[Frank Gothmann]

If you want to stick with Areca, here are two options:

Enclosure Arc-8040 for eight drives. That one has a raid controller build in so all you need is an PCIe SAS host card (eg. ARC-1320-8X)
or
Enlosure ARC-4036ML for eight drives. That one doesn’t have a raid controller so you need a PCIe SAS RAID card in your computer (eg. ARC-1223-8x)

In the first case, the actual RAID controller is in the enclosure and the host card just connects to the enclosure, in the second case the RAID card is in your computer and the enclosure is just a “bunch of disks” with an interface that allows you to connects it to your raid controller in your computer.

Functionality and performance of both are pretty much the same. With 3TB SATA3 drives in RAID6 you will see speed around 1000 MB, much, much more than with eSata or USB3. Also, you can expand those units with more enclosures if you ever need more storage and don’t want to just go with higher capacity drives. The Raid controllers will handle the expansion or creation of a second raid volume in the additional enclosure(s).

12 x Multicam with USB3 or eSata… I’d be surprised if you can work hassle free. With SAS you’d be more than ok bandwith wise.
What motherboard/systema re you using?

Hope this helps.

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“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
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[Frank Gothmann]

[Eric Brown] “First of all, does anyone have any suggestions of superior 8 bay RAID enclosures? Must be eSATA / USB 3 as I work in Windows. “

No, Areca makes great products.
Why does it have to be eSata or USB3. Are you working with a laptop? SAS will be much, much, much faster.

[Eric Brown] “My first question is- which drives? Seems like the WD Red drives are not 7200rpm, this would obviously hamper performance, correct? I can’t seem to figure out what Seagate calls its drives to be used in a RAID array. What about the HGST line? Is there any functional difference between the Deskstar and the Ultrastar line? Ultrastar is advertising 2 million hours MTBF while the Deskstar is 1 million. I am leaning towards either of these as they are 7200 RPM, as long as they are highly regarded. Ultrastar are quite a bit more expensive, but I am not going to skimp here. “

You can download a list of certified drives directly from Areca. If I remember correctly, the Red drives are ok. Performance wise, your bottleneck will be USB3/eSata, not the drives. So even non-7200rpm drives will saturate your connection.
I recommend HGST (ex HItachi) enterprise drives. With their previous generation drives, non-enterprise was ok and reliable, with their new drives I’d go with enterprise as the failure rate of the regular desktop models is too high with raid.

[Eric Brown] “2nd question. Any performance difference with regards t o size? all other things being equal would 2TB drives in an 8 disk array have faster read speeds than an array with 3 or 4TB drives? “

More likely the other way round, faster with 3 or 4 TB drives.

[Eric Brown] “would a RAID5 array with 8x4TB drives be dangerous? thats a lot of platters.”

Why not go Raid 6? For an 8-drive raid Raid 6 makes perfect sense.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
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[Frank Gothmann]

Paul, this is not how you usually format drives in Win7. That drive has not been partitioned so you cannot format it.
Go to your startmenu. Right-click on computer, go “manage”. In the window that opens go to the drives section. You should get a pop-up telling you that there is a new drive present that needs formatting.
In any case, you should see the drive there and you should be able to partition and then format the drive from this window.

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[Frank Gothmann]

[Michael Gissing] “Frank (or anyone) do you know if it lets da Vinci Resolve 10 (Win 7) render ProRes. I have been using Cinec to convert the final output to ProRes from Uncompressed. Having switched to Pr for final timeline out of Resolve I could use the Miraizon to make the Pr output ProRes but can I get to ProRes from Resolve?
“

Resolve is the only app I have come across where it’s not available (Miraizon is not the only codec that doesn’t show up in the selector panel, other QT codecs also don’t show) because it doesn’t use the regular QT selector. Why, I don’t know but it should be a minor technicality that is up to BM to fix. And they should. No issues with any other app that I know of, including Speedgrade.

Btw, if you want to go with the FFMPEG ie. Cinemartin route as you do right now you may want to look into using FFMPEG directly as it is free and you are not limited to only 2/6 cores but you utilize all cores on your system as new FFMPEG builds with Prores are fully multithreaded so you get something like in the attached screenshot. Much, much faster output. 1 Min encodes in approx. 7-10 seconds on my system.

——
“You also agree that you will not use these products for… the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, or chemical or biological weapons.”
iTunes End User Licence Agreement