[Lance Mungia]

Thanks all for your comments, including you Bob, don’t feel you’re being rude. Even if you were, I don’t mind rude if it helps.

I’m working with my tech guy on this project. But we are new and this is the first time we’ll be attempting to edit from a central server.

BOB REPLY – because of the latency issue with the Highpoint RocketRaid host adaptor for your SAS/SATA array, you will get DROP FRAME errors when you attempt to playback multiple systems from your shared volume. End of story. You buy the worst card on the market, you get the worst performance. Single user is a lot different than shared enviornment.

We have a RocketRAID 4322. I notice in another post you mentioned it may or may not be an alright card to use but not if you want a ton of expandability. I’m fine with the ProAvio 8 bay with 16TB, that’s going to hold us for a long time for what we do. Please let me know if I should get something else like Atto and if so does anyone have a recommendation? I wasn’t thinking of latency in the RAID card, just over ethernet. I may be able to get a better card if it’s going to be the troublemaker, if the Highpoint 4322 is not going to work. I would need any opinions on the 4322 pretty soon as I can probably work with the vendor to swap it out.

BOB REPLY – a simple network will not support this shared enviornment – it’s not fast enough. You either use link aggregation, iSCSI, Fibre Channel or 10 Gig ethernet. Simple Gig E network will fail ALL SYSTEMS the minute “system # 2” trys to start playing back media. And you can’t use Apple AFP. You must use SMB (which on the Apple computer is terrible, even in isolated enviroments). And you can’t use QMaster or setup a Render farm across this video network, because it will bog down (even with link aggregation), and your system will crash.

We’ve got a 4 port Ethernet card in the server (I have to check from which company) going to a decent managed GigE switch so we planned on using link aggregation and jumbo packets as you recommend. (Sorry if I left this out before, it was too late at night) Any render farm would probably be used overnight when one machine needs help with something complex not while all systems are in use.

1) Most importantly, am I going to have an issue using a pretty standard PC as server to my more expensive Mac editing stations? I can’t afford to buy a dedicated Mac Pro as a server.

REPLY – it won’t work. Your whole process won’t work. To get your MAC’s to work, you will have to switch to SMB, and you will see that the native performance is terrible.

Okay, I’m looking into getting a used Mac Pro for the server instead of using a PC. I’m also less concerned with having the couple of PC’s we have around the studio on the network anyway. Most of the jobs we do are on the Mac side and we’re moving that way primarily. My question would be, just how robust a Mac System do I need as a server? Is an older generation or two Quad core Mac Pro with say 6 or 8 gigs of RAM going to be enough?

Also, I have a new question about the drive array. I’ve had a vendor tell me just yesterday that it’s actually better to have a 32Mb Cache rather than a 64Mb cache on the 2TB drives, basically Hitachi versus WD. He said it has something to do with the boot times. All I need to know is if there is any validity to this statement that 32Mb cache is better. My instinct would tell me the opposite. Anyone have any thoughts?

Thanks again for the input.

Lance