[Gautam Pinto]

Eric, thanks for your response. Since I’m putting in a new RAID, and removing red rockets this week, I’ll do some tests and post back. Right now, I’m getting around 90FPS for renders, but the GPU meter goes red on occasion, and activity monitor never shows full CPU utilization. I’ll do some further testing late in the week.

I’ll try and experiment with 3x 580’s in the expansion chassis, with a quadro GUI, or 2x 580’s in the chassis and one 580 as GUI / GPU. Since I have a raid controller in the chassis, I’ll see what impact this has on performance also.

[Gautam Pinto]

Thanks Juan, what I am wondering is if increasing the GPU power will get me faster FPS at render time. Real time grading is no problem, and I don’t need any more GPU power for that. However, turning around dailies as fast as possible is a requirement, and I wanted to know if I can get upwards of 150FPS by increasing GPU power.

[Gautam Pinto]

Thank you for the advice Alex, I have looked into the unit and done some math and here is the breakdown.

Areca ARC-4036 X 2 units
Cost: $1800
Cost per bay: $112.50
Weight: 30lbs
Volume in cubic inches: 1560.582 (both units)

Proavio IS316JS
Cost: $2700
Cost per bay: $168.75
Weight: 78lbs
Volume in cubic inches: 2268.49

I understand the difference… the Proavio has server grade hardware and components, solid steel chassis, redundant power, and is designed for a server room.

The Areca is for a studio environment sitting beside someones desk in an edit suite, with non mission critical data on it.

On set, I’ll be offloading data to 3 locations always. One production raid, one internal raid, and one shuttle drive. The shuttle will leave my station twice daily and get backed up to LTO, as well as copied to a SAN. So if the Areca fails, I’m still covered 6 ways from sunday, and can temporarily switch to an internal RAID 0 in the Mac Pro, during the down time. So the train does not stop. I have backup components and procedures for almost every component in the chain.

Given the cost, features, cubic volume and weight I think the Areca makes more sense for my current requirements. However, I am definitely looking at both the Proavio, and Cineraid products for my studio work.

I appreciate all the help and advice, thank you.

[Gautam Pinto]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “PSUs, but is some $700 more expensive than two ARC-4036 units combined. At 78 lbs. (per their specs… diskless… really?), it seems to also be quite a bit heavier.”

Yes this chassis is that heavy, and without disks! I used to have a RS16SS Proavio unit and it was at least 100lbs with 16 disks. Anyway, I could get away with the size, and perhaps even the weight. But it’s the noise that would kill the deal. Also, Proavio and other companies like CineRaid, market their products for M&E environments but never publish the noise specs. This is always so frustrating for me, as these units are often used in studios, edit suites, film sets, and on-location where noise really matters. These units are not just used in machine rooms. Why don’t these companies ever bother to publish the noise levels of the different units?

Anyway.

I have never seen a 16bay chassis that is quiet. So two 8bay units that are quiet might be better in this regard.

[Gautam Pinto]

110FPS? Unfortunately yes. Rendering on set with two cameras and 5 hours of rushes a day can certainly introduce workflow challenges given budgetary restraints. Many “producers” don’t understand the complexity and difficulty of performing these tasks, and often I am performing with extremely unreasonable demands. It is my understanding though, that the actual encoding to a codec is a CPU and IO bound problem, and GPU is used for image processing, not encoding. So it’s a balance between more components than just the GPU.

I have to work with many camera systems. So for RED I have to re-configure, and for Alexa the same. This is another thing that many people don’t understand, a DIT system is a uniquely custom engineered solution to almost every production. I need to balance all the variables for hardware decisions based on all the factors in the equation.

Further to your points, at 650MB/ sec I think this is still within the threshold of acceptability. However, it brings up the idea of using a Thunderbolt enabled mac mini or laptop, with 10Gbe expansion chassis, for all the offloading tasks. These would be easy to replace in the field, and consume little space and power. However, again I will be loosing a slot for the 10Gbe card! I guess if I remove the HBA or the QIO I will be gaining a slot, so It might work out. I’ll explore the option.

Will a thunderbolt mac mini, or laptop with a 10Gbe network card in expansion chassis, connected to the mac pro directly provide good enough performance for about 250MB / sec throughput?

Since the volumes will be mounted over the network, they will not be block level, so I’ll have to research any issues with the file naming / extended attributes, permissions and offloading software, etc.

what do you think about a Mac Mini offloading data direct connected to the Mac Pro via 10Gbe and the Mac pro sharing the Raid over standard file sharing?

[Gautam Pinto]

Alex, both Cineraid units look like good choices. The build quality looks good and seems like others use the same chassis (small tree) it looks like it could be a CI design chassis or similar OEM. In terms of expander, I think these are the same LSI / Areca expanders used in most of the boxes out there. In terms of size weight and cost per bay, right now the ARC-4036 is looking very attractive. It’s small, light weight, and I can have 16bays by getting two units, for the same cost as the 12-bay Cineraid. The ARC-4036 can be had online for less than 1K, currently and it’s the smallest, lightest, well-built, least expensive 8bay expander chassis I can find. ( unless I build my own, which I don’t want to do, lest I incur the wrath of Bob )

Kidding aside, I’m leaning towards the ARC-4036 and the Atto R680 with cache assure technology.
If I need more storage capacity I can just pickup another 4036. The 8bay cineraid MSRP is almost double the cost of the 8bay 4036. And it’s so small and light, that I can fit 2 on my cart based setup if I need it!

For the heat issue with the Atto, I can always put in an extra silent fan in the expander chassis close to the card. Unscientifically speaking, I think this would provide adequate cooling for the thermal envelope of the enclosure.

For mobile set use the ARC-4036 looks great on paper. For the studio, I would seriously consider Proavio or Cineraid 16bay rack-mount chassis. They both look like great choices.

Thoughts?

[Gautam Pinto]

Interesting idea. While I like the idea it would also introduce the following challenges.

– Mac pro weighs over 50lbs with drives and takes up 8.2″ width and 20″ height.
– I would still need massive fast storage (another 4u enclosure)
– slower renders for ProRes with single Titan compared to 3x GTX 580’s
– larger increase in component failure probability

Interesting option. Here are the benefits…

I would not need a KVM as I could remote screen share to the other tower for offloading only.
Since the other tower is dedicated to offloading it could be the least expensive mac tower refurb quad core.
10Gbe file sharing from mac to mac would offer around 800MB / sec of theoretical throughput?
Avoid the cost and noise of a switch.

Eric, this does sound like good option. Would I be able to get 110FPS with a few nodes in resolve for Alexa 444 with LUT encoding to ProRes LT with a single Titan and a GUI card? Wait a sec is Titan dual width? What about power? Would I be able to squeeze a two cards in the tower? Or will I need Titan as GUI and GPU.

[Gautam Pinto]

Bob, thanks for your valued feedback, however I’m sorry I think you misunderstood.

I’m not looking for a shared storage environment. I have several systems to do that with If I need to. I am looking for a mobile single user storage Raid that can handle color grading a single stream of digital files while simultaneously offloading data at about 100MB / sec. I need something quiet, and not too heavy since I have to move the system on a wheeled cart setup. Currently I am using Resolve so unfortunately I need the PCIe expansion chassis for GPU cards. Since I have no slots left I am forced to use the chassis if I want to implement a SAS raid, or alternatively use a box that has a built in raid controller with my Atto H680 HBA. I just was looking for some advice for a quiet system that is not designed for a server room, but for a quieter environment. I just dont know if the H680 works well with the systems that have built in Raid controllers. I am currently using an older Areca Raid controller in the PCIe chassis along with 2x red rockets, 2x GPU’s and a Black Magic card, H680, GPU and PCIe expander card in the tower. Every works perfectly, and I have absolutely no issues. I use this system for months on end 24/7 on film and TV shows. I have backups for every component, but since everything is on a clean power UPS, I have not had any power issues at all. I want to just replace an older 4bay raid, with a newer 8-12 bay raid for larger capacity and higher performance.

Gautam

[Gautam Pinto]

Alex, looks like a good option. What is the MSRP? Also do you know if the weight is really 25lbs without drives? Does this chassis work the same with the Atto and the Areca? Have you been able to stress test with both cards, or benchmark with both cards?

Is there an 8bay option?

The Areca has a BBU, but the Atto cache assure looks like a more elegant solution. Care to comment?

Gautam